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The Heart of the Creeds 



HISTORICAL RELIGION IN THE LIGHT 
OF MODERN THOUGHT 



BY 



ARTHUR WENTWORTH EATON 



SECOND EDITION 



NEW YORK AND LONDON 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

(&\t ^Utiekerboclur IQuw 

1889 



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COPYRIGHT BY 

ARTHUR WENTWORTH H. EATON 
1888 



Gift 

Author 

JMY 22 mo 



Press of 

G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York 



TO THE 
CHERISHED MEMORY OF TWO WHO HAVE GONE FROM EARTH 

MY MOTHER 

ANNA AUGUSTA WILLOUGHBY HAMILTON 
EATON 

AND MY FRIEND 

ELISHA MULFORD, LL.D. 



| bcbicHte tjris book 



in 



PREFACE. 

In my ministry I have continually felt the 
need of some book which, in a clear and con- 
cise way, should put before people the rational 
theology of the early Church and of the best 
thinkers of our own time, and in so doing set 
forth the undisputed religious principles which 
make the basis of the Creeds and Institutions 
of historical Christianity. 

This book, which I have dedicated to her 
from whom I learned my first lessons of rever- 
ence for divine truth, and to the master of 
thought, whose friendship I was privileged to 
share in later life, tries to make clear the univer- 
sal meaning in the rites and symbols of the 
historic Faith, since, before the Christian con- 
science can be delivered from narrow doubts 
and Christian society from strifes and divisions, 
men must learn to discriminate fairly between 
what is necessary and what is accidental in 
religion. Writing it I have had in mind, chiefly 



VI 



Preface. 



the large class of young thinkers among the 
laity who, like myself, have often been sorely 
puzzled by the contradictions, and misled by 
the mistakes of popular theology, and to whom 
early Christian thought is little known. 

There are books like Caird's " Philosophy of 
Religion," Mulford's " Republic of God," Mau- 
rice's " Theological Essays " and other writings, 
Munger's " Freedom of Faith," Prof. Allen's 
" Continuity of Christian Thought," Dean 
Stanley's " Christian Institutions," Hatch's 
"Growth of Church Institutions," and R. E. 
Bartlett's Bampton Lectures for 1888, which 
are accessible to all. In these books the scien- 
tific basis and broader aspects of religion are 
ably and fully shown, and in their scholarly and 
reverent teachings many thoughts here briefly 
indicated will be found in more expanded form. 

Boston, Easter Week, 1888. 



" Below the surface stream, shallow and light, 
Of what we say we feel ; below the stream, 
As light, of what we think we feel, there flows, 
With noiseless current, strong, obscure, and deep, 
The central stream of what we feel indeed." 

— Matthew Arnold. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER 






PAGK 


I.- 


-God 





I 


II.- 


-Man 


. 


21 


III- 


-Christ .... 


. 39 


IV- 


-The 


Creeds 


. 61 


V- 


-The 


Bible 


. • *3 


VI- 


-The 


Church 


. 103 


VII.- 


-The 


Sacraments 


127 


VIII- 


-The 


Liturgy . 


• 153 


IX- 


-The 


Future Life . 


. 177 



" The supreme truths which speak to every believing heart, 
the way of salvation which is the same in all ages, the clear 
voice of God's love so tender and personal and simple that 
a child can understand it — these are things which must 
abide with us, and prove themselves mighty from age to age 
apart from all scientific study." — Robertson Smith. 

" The deepest truths are always becoming commonplaces till 
they are revivified by thought. And they are true thinkers 
and benefactors of their kind who, having thought them over 
once more and passed them through the alembic of their own 
hearts, bring them forth fresh-minded, and make them tell 
anew on their generation." — Principal Shairp, " Culture and 
Religion." 

1 ' Duty is to crush out fanaticisms and revere the Infinite, 
to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against 
miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, 
to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the garden 
of God." — Victor Hugo. 

" Nothing can be worse than stagnation of thought. It 
was an unhealthy condition of things when all was taken for 
granted ; when authority was invoked to stifle inquiry, and 
those who thought at all, thought only as their fathers had 
thought before them ; and when within the limits of the 
Church, at least, every thing was supposed to have been set- 
tled once for all at the Reformation, or at the last revision of 
the Prayer Book. We can hardly imagine the case of a 
thinking person who is not also at times a perplexed or even 
a doubting person." — Rev. Stanley Leathes, " The Chris- 
tian Creed." 

" Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not 
with the voice of God in thine own soul. 

' ' Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the 
soul, in conscious union with the Infinite, shall be for thee 
the only real existence. 

" This pleasing show of an external world through which 
thou art passing is given thee to interpret by the light which 
is in thee." — Dr. O. W. Holmes, " Life of Emerson." 

"It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing 
originated ; the only question is : Is it true in and for it- 
self? "—Hegel. 



GOD. 



"When the martyr Attalus, in the persecution of the Gal- 
lican Christians under Marcus Aurelius, was asked by his 
judges what was the name of God, he replied : ' '0 Qeo$ ovojxa 
ovk e'xsi go$ av$pG07to$.' " — Eusebius, v., i. 

" Our Father who art in heaven." — The Lord's Prayer. 

" One God and Father of all, who is above all and through 
all, and in you all." — St. Paul to the Ephesians. 

" For in him we live, and move, and have our being." 
— St. Paul to the Athenians. 

" I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of 
heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." — 
Nicene Creed. 

" Thou, O God hast made us for thee, and our heart is 
restless till it rests in thee."— St. Augustine. 

" It is said of Frances Power Cobbe that ' one day, musing 
on the great problems of existence, she said to herself that, 
although she knew nothing of God or of any law beyond her 
own soul, she would, at least, be true to that and merit the 
approbation of her own conscience. This resolution brought 
her almost immediately a renewed faith in God.' " — West- 
minster Review, December, 1845. 

"The conscience of man presumes the being of God ; it 
presumes a righteous being. There can be no adequate ap- 
prehension of conscience, nor explanation of the fact of con- 
science, that does not imply the being of God, and his rela- 
tions to man. 

" All that God is he imparts, he reveals. He is no more a 
distant being, that man cannot approach him ; he is not an 
inaccessible being, that man cannot find him ; he is not an 
unknown being, but what he is he has made known." — 
Mulford, " Republic of God." 

" Father of all ! In every age, 
In every clime adored, 
By saint, by savage, and by sage, 
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." 

— Pope's Universal Prayer. 



GOD. 

Belief in God is the fundamental article of 
every religious creed, the foundation stone of 
every theology. Throughout Christendom the 
people of all churches and sects are unanimous 
in saying: " I believe in God." But, to many 
persons, it perhaps does not occur that this 
fundamental tenet of theology is held with very 
great differences in the religious world. Within 
the Christian Church itself, professing to base 
its beliefs on the teachings of Jesus, and to 
hold, at least in essentials, a united faith, there 
have been great and important differences in 
men's conceptions of what God is. The changes 
in popular theology from age to age have, in 
fact, resulted chiefly from a growing reason- 
ableness or unreasonableness in this funda- 
mental doctrine. 

In the same community to-day are often 
to be found churches from whose pulpits or 
chancels the teaching about God differs so 

3 



4 Heart of the Creeds. 

radically that we are compelled to define for 
ourselves with great care, separating between 
true and false in them, our own beliefs in Him. 
Especially is this necessary when we further 
see that sectarian strifes and controversies, 
those dark shadows ever lurking in the back- 
ground of church life, are directly traceable to 
conflicting views of God. The sin most abhor- 
rent to a devout Hebrew of ancient times was 
that of idolatry, the root principle of which 
was, as it ever is, a distorted image of God in 
the mind. And our own Litany, praying that 
men may be delivered from " heresy and schism," 
asks in that familiar petition that people shall 
be kept from false conceptions of God, since 
true ideas concerning Him have been at the 
bottom of all peace-bringing, elevating, spiritual 
faiths, false opinions at the bottom of all fierce 
and degrading theologies. 

One of the truths concerning the Bible, that 
careful study of its various parts has made 
clear, is that the Hebrews did not, by any 
means, all have similar conceptions of God ; 
that the popular theism of the Pentateuch, for 
example, is of a very much lower order than 
that of the later prophets; that Jesus, in His 



God. 5 

day, held very different views of God from those 
of the chief theologians of Judea, among the 
Scribes and Pharisees. 

Jehovah, to the earlier Hebrews and the 
popular theologians of our Saviour's time, was 
only one of the great national or tribal gods, 
greater and better than all others, but, like 
them, the god of one people, having many of 
the imperfections that the other Semitic tribes, 
the Moabites and Ammonites and Philistines, 
who lived near the Hebrews, ascribed to their 
gods. In their thought they conceived of Him 
as " a great, non-natural, magnified man," who 
created the heavens and the earth as an archi- 
tect makes a house ; who got angry, and 
changed His mind, and sent plagues on His ene- 
mies, and fought the battles of His subjects, 
performing stupendous feats in the sphere of 
nature in order to frighten the one or help the 
other. The prophets and others, on the con- 
trary, often rose to the most exalted planes of 
thought about God. " Canst thou, by search- 
ing, find out God?" they say. "Canst thou 
find out the Almighty unto perfection ? It is 
high as heaven ; what canst thou do ? Deeper 
than hell, what canst thou know ? " " For thus 



6 Heart of the Creeds. 

saith the high and lofty One, that inhabiteth 
eternity, whose name is Holy ; I dwell in the 
high and holy place, with him, also, that is of a 
contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit 
of the humble, and to revive the heart of the 
contrite ones." 

Such passages as these, from the Books of 
Job and Isaiah, show that their authors had 
risen far above the popular conceptions, in 
their thought of God, just as in their times 
Kleanthes and Plato and other great Greek 
writers rose far above the popular mythology 
of their country. But the Hebrew idea of God 
was most fully exalted and spiritualized by 
Jesus, and after him St. Paul, who taught that 
God was not a changeable deity, made in the 
likeness of man, but the unchanging spiritual 
life of the universe, and the Father of all man- 
kind. "God is a Spirit," Christ said to the 
woman of Samaria, when she spoke to Him 
about the conflict between the Hebrew belief 
that true worship could be performed only at 
Jerusalem, and the Samaritan belief that Mt. 
Gerizim was the proper place for it, — " God is a 
Spirit, and they that worship Him must wor- 
ship in spirit and in truth," thus refusing to 



God. 7 

localize the Divine Presence, or limit the com- 
munication of the Divine Spirit. 

St. Paul, at Athens, a little more than thirty- 
years afterward, uttered these eloquent words, 
in exactly the same spirit and meaning: 
" God who made the world and all things 
therein, seeing that He is Lord of heaven and 
earth, dwelleth not in temples made with 
hands. Neither is He served by the hands of 
men, as though he needed any thing ; for it is 
He that giveth unto all life and breath and all 
things. And He made of one blood all the 
nations of mankind, to dwell upon the face of 
the whole earth ; and ordained to each the ap- 
pointed seasons of their existence, and the 
bounds of their habitation. That they should 
seek God, if haply they might feel after Him 
and find Him, though He is not far from every 
one of us ; for in Him we live and move and 
have our being ; as certain also of your own 
poets have said ; ' For we are also His off- 
spring. 

The views of God held and taught by Jesus 
and St. Paul were indeed spiritual and pro- 

1 This quotation is from Aratus, a Greek poet, like St. 
Paul himself a native of the province of Cilicia. 



8 Heart of the Creeds. 

found, but all their followers, the new converts 
to Christianity, did not share in them. Side by- 
side in the Christian Church grew up two en- 
tirely distinct sorts of theistic belief : one crude 
and anthropomorphic, like the earlier Hebrew, 
or Greek polytheistic belief ; the other profound 
and philosophical, like the thought expressed 
in the passages quoted from the Gospel of St. 
John and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. 

In the minds of one set of thinkers was firmly 
rooted the Oriental idea of God as a great, man- 
like being living far away from the world, con- 
trolling it through intermediate agents, much as 
the Czar of Russia controls that part of his 
empire which lies across the Ural Mountains. 
As theology became more of a science in the 
Christian Church, this view of God as an abso- 
lute monarch, made in the likeness of an earthly 
despot, took on more definiteness, and from it, 
by a natural process, in the Western world, 
sprang the Augustinian or, as we know it bet- 
ter, Calvinistic form of the leading Christian 
doctrines — Divinity of Christ, Trinity, Atone- 
ment, Heaven and hell. 

In the Calvinistic thought, the world was a 
lifeless machine moved by the will of a Super- 



God, 9 

human Being, who never came near it. Man 
also was His creation, but the relation between 
him and God was no more than that between 
the clay pitcher and the potter who moulds it. 
Revelation was not to be sought in the better 
instincts of humanity, and the process of his- 
tory, in philosophy and poetry and art, but 
merely in certain utterances of the few inspired 
Hebrews and Christians who wrote the books 
of the Bible. The proof of God's interest in 
the world lay not in His continuous renewal of 
its life, and in the increase of moral and intel- 
lectual power among men, but rather in certain 
interferences with the regular working of events, 
called miracles. Christ was not the highest 
expression of the great universal fact of incar- 
nation, " God's idea of man completed," but an 
incongruous being, neither God nor man, and 
yet both. 

The doctrine of Trinity was not the summing 
up under the symbol of three-foldness of all the 
great attributes of God which have their root in 
His eternal personality, the brief expression of 
all the highest philosophy concerning the rela- 
tion between the divine and the human, God 
and His creation, but rather a division of the 



io Heart of the Creeds. 

infinite God into three finite personalities in 
some measure antagonistic to each other. The 
Atonement was not the realization in humanity 
once for all, in Christ, of perfect righteousness, 
the one complete exhibition of sacrifice, but 
rather, as with the heathen, the propitiation by 
means of literal blood of a vengeful and deeply 
outraged deity. Heaven and hell were not 
progressive states of mind and feeling, condi- 
tions of the inner life consequent upon obedience 
or disobedience to natural law, but rather 
places of physical delight or torture, into 
which, at death, for their good deeds or bad 
deeds, men were arbitrarily put by their Crea- 
tor. Law itself was not the eternal expression 
of the life of the universe, so much as the fiat 
of a despotic will. 

That was one, and because it requires less 
grasp of intellect, and through the middle ages 
was most in harmony with the imperial temper 
and aims of the Church, it became after the 
fourth century the popular view of God, and 
His relation to the world. But there was an- 
other and better theology prevalent during the 
first four centuries of the Christian era, which 
is commonly termed the conception of God as 



God. 1 1 

" immanent in the world." It is a conception 
that has never been lost, even in the crudest 
and darkest times of religious thought, and 
now that the intellect of man, released from the 
fetters that bound it when the mediaeval or 
Calvinistic theologies held sway, is free to ap- 
proach all the sources of divine knowledge, to 
find in arguments unrecognized in other days 
its strongest proofs of God, belief in God as 
the indwelling Life and Power of the Universe, 
Soul of all things, Omnipresent Spirit, Source 
of strength and order, Fountain of beauty, 
" Light of Light," who dwelleth on high, and 
humbleth himself to behold the things that 
are in heaven and in the earth, is necessarily 
coming to supplant the other view. In the bet- 
ter conception God is not a person in the sense 
in which we are persons ; not as Michael Angelo 
painted Him, a marvellous man " with the brow 
of Jove and the lightning in his grasp" ; but the 
Great Spiritual Life, who robes Himself in a 
world-vesture, and faintly yet truly reveals His 
noblest attributes, His divine character in the 
personality of man. In the third chapter of 
Exodus there is a profound passage in which 
God is said to have told Moses, when he asked 



1 2 Heart of the Creeds, 

what name he should call Him by, that His 
name was simply " I am," meaning that God is 
too great to be understood by men, or named 
in human language. " I am that I am! " And 
we shall probably never get much nearer an 
adequate description of God, than our English 
Churchman, Wordsworth got, in his " Lines 
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," 
where he says so profoundly that God had re- 
vealed Himself to him as, 

" A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

Tennyson, in his little fragment called " The 
Higher Pantheism," writes : 

" Speak to Him thou for He hears, 
And spirit with spirit can meet ; 
Closer is He than breathing, 
Nearer than hands and feet." 

And his lines breathe much the same spirit as 
those words in the thirtieth chapter of Deuter- 
onomy, used also by St. Paul in the Epistle to 



God. 1 3 

the Romans : " For this commandment which 
I command thee this day, it is not hidden from 
thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven 
that thou shouldest say : Who shall go up for 
us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we 
may hear it, and do it ? Neither is it beyond 
the sea, that thou shouldest say : Who shall go 
over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that 
we may hear it, and do it ? But the word is 
very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy 
heart, that thou mayest do it." Even Pope 
writes : 

" All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body nature is, but God the soul ; — 
To Him no high, no low, no great, no small, 
He fills, He bounds, connects, and equals all." 

And Emerson says : 

" Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line 
Severing rightly His from thine ; 
Which is human, which divine ? " 

Thus the incarnation is a process having its 
highest point in the Christ ; the Trinity is the 
doctrine, first, of God as unrevealed and unre- 
vealable, God in the great unfathomableness of 
His being, God the Father ; second, God as 
immanent in nature and in humanity, God as 



14 Heart of the Creeds. 

the reason or light of all men, the Son who 
binds together all things, temporal and eternal, 
human and divine ; third, God the Sustainer 
and Living Spiritual Power of the visible uni- 
verse and of man its noblest member, God the 
Holy Spirit. Revelation, in its largest sense, is 
to be sought in the long process of history and 
the life of man. The Atonement, typically 
wrought out in the historic Christ, is the recon- 
ciliation of the spirit of man with the highest 
truth, with God. Heaven and hell are ever ad- 
vancing conditions of the soul in this world, and 
all worlds where men may be. 

The former view of God prevailed in the 
Western Church during the Middle Ages, and 
indeed has lasted to our own day, and this fact 
is largely attributable to the influence, first, 
of Tertullian, and then of the Latin father 
Augustine, who was converted to Christianity 
in the year 387, but whose mind never lost 
the unhealthy tone it had received from the 
Manichaean philosophy to which, for nineteen 
years, between the ages of twelve and thirty, 
he had given his allegiance. Certain parts of 
our Prayer Book bear the impress of Augustine's 
thought, the Litany perhaps showing it most of 



God. 1 5 

all. But the oldest parts of the Prayer Book, 
and especially the so-called Apostles' Creed, 
which we say every Sunday, the universal 
creed of Christendom, were made under the 
influence of the larger and freer and more 
rational theology of a time nearer to Christ 
and the Apostles than the fourth and fifth 
centuries when Augustine lived and wrote. 
The chief representatives, in the early Church, 
of this theology are the much more profound 
and rational thinkers, Clement and Origen, 
whose thought illustrates what is known 
as the Alexandrian theology, and Athana- 
sius, who has always in the history of doc- 
trines borne the name of " The Father of 
Orthodoxy." 

These, in brief outline, are the two forms of 
belief about God that have prevailed in the 
Christian world, and their histories. The Au- 
gustinian theology has hitherto colored most 
of the religious thought of this continent, but 
with the increase of independent thought and 
study, the older and better and more truly or- 
thodox form of theology of the Alexandrian 
fathers of the Church is returning, and in intel- 
ligent and broadly thinking quarters, is fast sup- 



1 6 Heart of the Creeds. 

planting the cruder form of religious belief that 
has prevailed. 

This older, more rational view of God, as 
everywhere present in the world, is sometimes 
felt to be too vague and obscure for ordinary 
minds to grasp, but the truth is, God is so great 
that when we think most truly about Him, we 
are least able to express our thought. It was 
the exceeding poverty of the other view of God 
that made it possible to think definitely of Him 
as a great man sitting on a throne in the dis- 
tant heavens, whence He issued laws to men. 
All our language about Him is figurative. He 
has no material form, no jewelled throne above 
the sky, no literal judgment-book open before 
him. He dwells everywhere ; His throne is 
the eternal order of the universe ; His reign 
the supremacy of law and love ; His judgment- 
book the conscience of the race. We cannot 
make adequate theologies ; our best thought 
comes so far below the great reality, and our 
richest language is so poor. We can speak of 
God only in figures and poetically, and we must 
always beware of mistaking this figurative lan- 
guage for scientific or precise description. It is 
this mistake that has led the Church, when the 



God, 1 7 

Augustinian theology has prevailed, into per- 
secutions and cruelties innumerable, while the 
Alexandrian theology has generally fostered a 
spirit of peace. 

Yet, in conceiving of God as everywhere 
present in the universe, creating, renewing, in- 
spiring, life of our life, inspirer of our best 
thoughts and deeds, we are not Pantheists. 
Pantheism confounds God with His creation ; 
Christianity has always maintained as carefully 
the transcendence of God as His immanence. 
He is in all things ; and yet the highest and 
most essential truth concerning Him is that 
He is a Personal God. But his Personality, 
which is the root and source of our own, His 
mind and affections, of which ours are but 
" broken lights," are not limited like ours. All 
that we know of reason and right emotion in 
man we may think of as existing in unlimited 
fulness in God. All that we can fathom of the 
mystery of human souls we may regard as ex- 
isting infinitely in Him from whom human 
souls come forth. 

One question more some minds will be glad 
to have touched upon in this chapter, the very 
important question as to the proof that God 



1 8 Heart of the Creeds. 

exists at all. In the old New England theology 
this would have been the first thing to settle 
in a chapter treating of belief in God ; but we 
have entirely given up trying to prove God's 
existence from the mere abstract propositions 
of thought, or from the observed sequence of 
nature, or fitness of means to ends, or from any 
thing outside our own souls, and are simply 
and confidently willing to assume His existence 
in all we say or do. The highest proof of God's 
existence is the fact that we are able to think 
of Him at all, as the strongest and most con- 
vincing argument for immortality is the fact 
that we are able to conceive of immortality. 
The human soul is both finite and infinite, both 
human and divine, and we cannot by any exer- 
cise of the mind ever help believing in God. 
His personality is the source of our personality, 
His thought the source of our deepest thought. 
" In Him we live and move and have our be- 
ing," and instead of going to books for argu- 
ments for His existence, we must obey the in- 
junction of an old seventeenth century divine 
of our Church : " bitra te quaere Deum : " Seek 
for God within thine own soul. 

The injunction to seek for God within one's 



God. 1 9 

own soul, seems to some persons very vague 
and unsatisfactory. They prefer to be told to 
seek Him in something He has done or is de- 
clared to have done outside of themselves. It 
is true we should never forget to see God's 
revelation of Himself without us, in the world 
of nature, or in the record of the movements 
of human life and thought we call history. 
But the revelation of God in our own souls 
through the instincts of love, justice, sincerity, 
and reverence on which we act, and the voice 
of reason which always speaks within us, pre- 
cedes any, however important, revelation with- 
out us. If men would habitually think not of 
what God has done, but of what their own 
souls, all the truth and reason within them, de- 
clare that He is, they would find the process 
of belief in Him strangely easy. 

" The pure in heart may know God, but the 
critical understanding can never comprehend 
Him," says a modern English philosopher; 
and these forcible words were written near the 
close of the second century, by Theophilus, a 
bishop of Antioch : " If thou sayest, Show me 
thy God, I answer, Show me first thy man, and 
I will show thee my God. Show me first 



20 Heart of the Creeds. 

whether the eyes of thy soul see, and the ears 
of thy heart hear. For as the eyes of the body 
perceive earthly things, light and darkness, 
white and black, beauty and deformity, so the 
ears of the heart and the eyes of the soul can 
see God." 

Our own New England philosopher, Emer- 
son, says, in his essay on the " Over Soul M : 
" We know that all spiritual being is in man. 
A wise old proverb says, ' God comes to see us 
without bell ' — that is, as there is no screen or 
ceiling between our heads and the infinite 
heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul, 
where man the effect ceases and God the cause 
begins." 

Thus he gave us, and thus we must explain 
Jesus' great doctrine of the universal Father- 
hood of God. There is an eternal relationship 
between God and every created soul. The 
true laws of life are the laws of His life in us. 
Not only is belief in Him possible, but actual 
unbelief is impossible. When men are most 
questioning Flis existence, they are, often, 
most profoundly believing in Him. It may 
be truly said that scepticism never reaches the 
soul. 



MAN. 



" So God created man in His own image ; in the image of 
God created He him." — Genesis, i., 27. 

" The Platonic view of the soul, as a spiritual substance, an 
effluence from Godhood, which under certain conditions be- 
comes incarnated in perishable forms of matter, is doubtless 
the view most consonant with the present state of our knowl- 
edge." — John Fiske, " Destiny of Man," p. 43. 

"The divinity that stirs within us." — Addison. 

" If a person could be persuaded of this principle as he 
ought, that we are all originally descended from God, and 
that He is the Father of men and gods, I conceive that he 
would never think of himself meanly or ignobly. 

" If what philosophers say of the kinship between God and 
men be true, what has any one to do, but like Socrates, when 
he is asked what countryman he is, never to say that he is a 
citizen of Athens, or of Corinth, but of the Universe."— 
Epictetus. 

" Know thyself then the pride of His creation, the link 
uniting divinity and matter ! Behold a part of God Himself 
in thee ! Remember thine own dignity, nor dare descend to 
evil or to meanness." — Ancient Brahminical Writing. 
" Every inmost aspiration 
Is God's angel, undefiled, 
And in every ' O my Father,' 
Slumbers deep a ' Here, my child.' " 

" Man is the free, personal unity of spirit and nature. In 
every human individual there exists something uncondi- 
tioned. " — M artensen. 

" Human thought cannot recognize itself as imperfect and 
relative without conceiving God as perfect and absolute. We 
see every thing in God." — Malebranche. 

" The aim of man should be to secure the highest and most 
harmonious development of his powers to a complete and 
consistent whole." — Humboldt. 



22 



MAN. 

The central principle of Christianity, in op- 
position to some of the older faiths of the East, 
was the value of the individual. Christ taught 
that not man alone but men were the objects 
of the divine love and care. And in all His 
teaching concerning the human soul, He as- 
sumed in men not merely the capacity for 
knowledge of the divine, but actual possession 
of the divine nature, by which alone such 
responsibility in divine things as he attributed 
to man could be regarded as possible. 

The Christian belief in mankind as divinely 
related, is so spontaneous, so fundamental to 
the best religious thought, that no theology 
making a contrary declaration has ever been 
able to shield itself from the charge of self- 
contradiction. Theology, to be consistent, must 
declare frankly, and take as its starting-point 
the doctrine of Jesus, that the deepest truth 
about men is that they are the sons of God. 

23 



24 Heart of the Creeds. 

Confusion regarding this fundamental truth in- 
evitably results in confusion as to the meaning 
and the means of salvation, and the purpose of 
God in the establishment of His Church. And 
in this we have the explanation of much of the 
vagueness and uncertainty in matters of belief, as 
well as the conflict of opinions, that exists with- 
in the churches of the modern Christian world. 

Most people have received from their teach- 
ers a double education in religious things. The 
Bible and other religious books sometimes 
speak so strongly of human unbelief and sin 
as almost to warrant the teaching that there is 
no natural relationship between the soul and 
God, but rather a great wall of separation, 
never to be removed ; no closer bond of sym- 
pathy than among men exists between the 
ruler and his subjects. And such teaching is 
part of the teaching of popular religion. 

But the view of these utterances which finds 
in them the foundation stones of a theology 
radically at variance with that in whose reasona- 
ble teaching that man is truly God-related we 
have all likewise been educated, is, of course, 
superficial and false. 

In days when the world knew far less than it 



Man. 25 

does now of the value of charity, " the bond of 
peace," when instead of mercy and the sense of 
human brotherhood, despotic cruelty and dis- 
regard of private rights prevailed, it is not 
strange that a system of theology should have 
grown up which, so far as it was able, ignored 
the simple relationship of man to God, and on 
the Gospel of Jesus imposed a grim and un- 
lovely structure of logic, or an artificial ritual 
method it called " the way of life." Two sys- 
tems continually waging warfare against each 
other, the Sacerdotalism of Rome and the Cal- 
vinism of many Protestant sects, thus share in 
the radical error of a false view of man's funda- 
mental relationship to the divine. Calvinism 
declares that man is not God's child, but merely 
the creation of His hands, in his nature com- 
pletely at variance with truth and goodness : 

" To all that 's good, averse and blind, 
But prone to all that 's ill ; 
What dreadful darkness veils our mind ! 
How obstinate our will ! 

Conceived in sin, (O wretched state ! ) 
Before we draw our breath, 
The first young pulse begins to beat 
Iniquity and death." ! 

1 Watts' Hymns. 



26 Heart of the Creeds. 

Whatever we do or think before conversion, 
is necessarily wrong, since our whole nature is 
corrupt and wicked. At God's hands we de- 
serve, not the treatment which children have a 
right to expect at the hands of their parents, but 
only wrath and punishment for the sins we have 
committed, or what is worse, the evil we in- 
herit ; and whatever of good He gives us is of 
His " free grace and bounty." a 

Romanism is built on the same perverted 
view of man and his relationship to God. 

Teaching that man is estranged from God in 
every fibre of his soul it compels him to come un- 
der a system, like that of many heathen religions, 
in which a priesthood and sacrificial rites hold 
a prominent place, before he can properly be 
regarded as a child of God, an inheritor of the 
Kingdom of Heaven. So on the basis of its 
mistaken belief regarding man Calvinism has 
shaped its logic of regeneration, and justifica- 
tion by faith, and future reward and punish- 
ment ; and on the same basis Romanism has 



1 The Plymouth Brethren, who represent the extremest 
form of Calvinism, refuse to allow " unconverted people " to 
use the Lord's Prayer. They do not teach it to their children, 
and they are at least logically consistent in not doing so. 



Man. 2 7 

reared its doctrine of salvation by means of 
the Church and the Sacraments, apart from 
which man must be left to the " uncovenanted 
mercies " of God. 

The view of man implicity and in his direct 
teaching recognized by Christ, and afterward 
for many years common in the Church, was the 
simplest and most natural that can be held. 
Jesus had no theories of total depravity, and 
predestination, of substitutionary atonement, 
and justification by faith, or deliverance from 
God's wrath by means of the Church and the 
Sacraments. He taught that in his deepest na- 
ture man is always the child of God, yet always 
needing light on his half-perceived relationship 
to his Father, always needing to have the 
springs of his soul purified, to have the way of 
duty made plainer to him, his moral obligations 
pointed out, his conscience touched and quick- 
ened ; in short, needing an education no teacher 
less perfectly at home with truth than Christ 
himself can give him. His parable of the Prod- 
igal Son is an epitome of His Gospel, and in 
that the misguided and wandering sons of men 
are represented as living in a far country in 
moral filth and degradation, yet never for a 



28 Heart of the Creeds. 

moment less truly sons of God than if they were 
living in the Father's house of truth and purity. 

It is true He gave the world the important 
lesson of the new birth, but that meant the 
awakening within men of the deepest instincts 
and emotions, the opening of their eyes to see 
the beauty of divine truth and life as it was 
natural for them to see it. He sometimes 
spoke to people as every moral reformer has 
felt it necessary to speak, as if the world and 
sin had taken entire possession of them ; and 
yet He knew that if righteousness was not 
deeper in them than sin, sense of God stronger 
than atheism, it was impossible that they could 
be moved by His exhortations. He assumed 
in His hearers a true and proper sense of divine 
things, a natural power to discriminate between 
the things that were for the soul's health and 
those which wrought in it decay and death. 

When He called His first disciples from their 
fishing-boats or places of business, he did not 
tell them, in the Calvinistic way, that they 
must be regenerated and consciously converted 
before they could become His disciples, nor did 
He ever teach them that Baptism created men 
children of God. He treated them simply as 



Man. 29 

any true elder brother would treat his needy 
and dependent younger brothers, bade them go 
with Him, and let Him teach them about His 
Father, who was also just as truly theirs. 

For a good while after Christ's death, the 
Church, in a simple, undogmatic way, held that 
simplest view of man's relation to God. Its 
teachers believed in the ideal nature of man, as 
well as the dark and sinful nature, the divine 
element as well as the human within him. 
They often quoted that passage in the first 
chapter of Genesis, which declares that man 
was created " in the image of God," and they 
understood by that, and by that other passage, 
in which God is said to " have breathed into 
man's nostrils the breath of life," that the soul 
has God's own life in it. It was only very 
slowly that the notion, that man by nature is 
utterly separated from God and lost to right- 
eousness, came to prevail, and we can trace the 
steps by which, under the influence of the 
great Augustine, it finally came to overshadow 
the fresher and simpler teaching of Christ and 
the early Apostles and the Greek fathers of the 
Church. 

Its origin is to be sought in an exaggerated 



30 Heart of the Creeds. 

feeling of human sinfulness, and in a growing 
belief in the importance of the visible Catholic 
Church in mediating between God and human- 
ity. The earlier theology said : There is no 
doubt that we are sinful, but the very fact that 
we know and feel our sinfulness, shows that 
there is a deeper and better self in us which 
allies us to Him who is the Source of all good. 
We are not utterly gone from righteousness 
any more than we are perfectly true to God. 
We inherit propensities to sin, and weaknesses 
of will that keep us from always doing right, 
but all our lives we never lose the conviction 
that our actual welfare is not furthered by doing 
wrong, nor that we are untrue to ourselves 
when we disobey the least of God's commands. 
And these commands of God embrace whatso- 
ever conscience, instructed by reason, whispers 
within us that we should or should not do. 

For confirmation of the Augustinian doctrine 
of total depravity, theologians of the Latin 
Church repeatedly turned to the allegorical 
story in Genesis of the temptation and fall, 
and taking it for literal history, traced all hu- 
man sin to Adam, and made many strange as- 
sertions of the implication of all men in their 



Man. 3 1 

great forefather's guilt. Thus was shaped the 
dogma that still haunts the Church, and pro- 
duces confusion in many thoughtful minds who 
see it lurking like a dark shadow behind the 
devotional words of certain parts of the Prayer 
Book, the dogma of original sin. " It was un- 
known," says Dr. Allen, " to Greek theology, 
as well as an innovation also in Latin thought, 
though it had been vaguely broached by Ter- 
tullian and Cyprian, and intimations looking 
toward it are to be found in the writings of 
Ambrose." And it led, both in its formation 
and after its irony had fully entered into west- 
ern thought, to many bitter discussions and 
strifes that seem all the sadder when we re- 
member Christ's simple teaching concerning 
man. With it is connected the view, once so 
common, but now generally discarded, that by 
the fall of Adam, death and all the sicknesses 
and minor ills that necessarily belong to man's 
lot were brought about. In it are involved 
many dark and dreary thoughts of God and the 
future, and by it the problem of evil, always 
insoluble, yet not so strange, if we regard the 
human race as slowly but steadily developing, 
intellectually and morally, from the beginning, 



2,2 Heart of the Creeds. 

is unnecessarily complicated. To this doctrine, 
and the men whose minds it most strongly in- 
fluenced, rather than to any, however oriental 
figurative language of the New testament, is 
chiefly to be traced the mediaeval, Miltonic 
doctrine of everlasting punishment, a doctrine 
that once at least in the Prayer Book seems to 
find expression, where in the Litany we pray 
to be delivered from everlasting damnation ; 
the words, however, having for us a deep 
spiritual truth and meaning. 

How, then, in these modern days, when men 
are trying to look at all questions as the Chris- 
tian thinkers of Alexandria did — fairly and in 
the light of reason, — shall we define for our- 
selves the doctrine of man's spiritual nature ? 

An old seventeenth century divine of our 
Church, Benjamin Whichcote, used to quote, 
very often, as expressing. what he regarded as 
the true view of Biblical teaching and the view 
of reason, concerning man, those words from 
the Proverbs, " The spirit of man is the candle 
of the Lord," thus affirming all that the best 
thinkers of the Church before Augustine had be- 
lieved and taught concerning the divine relation- 
ship between the human soul and God. St. Paul 



Man. 33 

speaks feelingly in the seventh chapter of Ro- 
mans about the conflict between good and evil 
desires that went on in him, and confesses, 
as we all have to confess, that he had not al- 
ways strength to do right. But you will notice 
that he lays just as much stress on the good 
nature that dwelt in him as the bad, that he 
recognizes himself and all men as endowed with 
the two natures that he elsewhere calls the 
Adam and the Christ, the old man and the new. 
That struggle of St. Paul's is the common 
struggle of the race. The old man with his 
deeds, that is the lower, less perfect nature is 
daily in revolt against the new man, the higher 
and holier in us, of which Christ is the type 
and head. And so we, like him, are often made 
conscious by our own experience of the great 
double fact of our natures. 

The divine nature of man is a frequent 
theme of great writers. In spite of this 

" Muddy vesture of decay 

That doth so grossly close us in," 

St. Paul, as has been said, recognized in man 
the movement of righteousness and freedom. 
And it was that that made it possible for him to 



34 Heart of the Creeds. 

appeal earnestly, as he did, to the disunited and 
sensual people who composed the Corinthian 
Church, to regard their bodies as the temples of 
the Holy Spirit. It was that he meant when he 
said : " But to us there is but one God, the 
Father, of whom are all things, and we in Him,r 
Emerson says : " We live in succession, in 
division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, 
within man is the soul of the whole ; the wise 
silence ; the universal beauty, to which every 
part and particle is equally related ; the eternal 
One." " In all conversation between two per- 
sons," he says, " tacit reference is made, as to a 
third party, to a common nature. That third 
party or common nature is not social ; it is im- 
personal ; it is God." Again he says : " I feel 
the same truth how often in my trivial conver- 
sation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher 
in each overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods 
to Jove from behind each of us." And in Ten- 
nyson's fragment, " Flower from the crannied 
wall," where he says: 

" If I could know what you are, little flower, 
Root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is," 

the same truth appears. 



Man. 35 

Caird says, most significantly : " The very con- 
sciousness of our finitude indicates that we have 
already transcended it. If we were wholly finite, 
we should never be conscious of our finitude. 
We could have no sense of imperfection, but for 
the presence in us of a standard of perfection." 

The evil in man is testified to by every one, 
and so near at hand, so dark and dreadful is its 
presence, that it is not strange that it should 
so often have obscured the lovelier truth con- 
cerning man ; that sin rather than redemption 
should have been the starting-point of the me- 
diaeval theology, and the Devil the destroyer, 
rather than Christ the redeemer, the hero of 
Calvinistic thought. 

The problem of evil is one that has never 
been solved to the intellect, as evil itself can 
never be reconciled with the better self of man ; 
but the more truly we know ourselves, the more 
sensible must we become of the imperfection 
in even our best thoughts and works. On the 
other hand, if we forget or refuse to reverence 
the divine light of human reason, the eternal 
rectitude, the infinite truth in man, we shall in- 
evitably fall into false and querulous ways of 
thought concerning him. 



36 Heart of the Creeds. 

The figurative account in Genesis of the fall 
of man, as of the creation of the world, used to 
be regarded as literal history. By that account 
people judged that man was created at first not 
only innocent, but complete in all his nature, 
and that in one moment he fell from a state of 
moral grandeur to one of moral degradation 
and blindness. This fallen nature he then en- 
tailed on his descendants, and so the evolution 
of the race has been downward, not upward. 

That was the doctrine of the mediaeval 
Church ; but in the light of many truths that 
history and science have revealed, it is no 
longer generally believed. Whether man has 
been evolved from lower forms of life or not, 
there is every reason to think that he has risen 
from a very low state of intelligence and 
moral consciousness to his present condition ; 
that in his whole history, as in the universe at 
large, the law has been, " first the blade, then 
the ear, then the full corn in the ear." We do 
not now take the account in Genesis as literal 
history ; we regard it as an allegory of the in- 
ward experience of every man. Men come into 
the world innocent, as to actual guilt, but with 
latent capacities for good and evil within them. 



Man, 37 

As life goes on, they eat of many a forbidden 
tree, and so fall into sin and sorrow, but, as in 
the story of Genesis, such experiences make 
them wise to discern good from evil, and per- 
haps help them to a noble final self-conquest. 

To sum up the doctrine of man : In the light 
of the New Testament and the best subsequent 
Christian thought, we believe that the soul of 
man contains divine and human, infinite and fi- 
nite elements. We do not hold sin to be a 
light thing, but we believe that righteousness 
lies deeper in us than sin ; that it is inwrought 
with the fibre of our being, while sin, as some 
one has said, is the dye, a very dark and dread- 
ful dye, that stains the fabric of our life. And 
consequently, that, as Epictetus declares, " If 
a man could be persuaded of this principle as 
he ought, he never would think of himself 
meanly or ignobly." 

Some may question whether this teaching is 
in harmony with that of the Prayer Book, but 
the teaching of the Prayer Book, like that of 
the Bible, is to be discovered rather in its gen- 
eral spirit than from isolated words or phrases. 
We must remember how simply and confidently 
the Prayer Book puts the Church's prayers into 



2>& Heart of the Creeds. 

the mouths of all men and women who will use 
them, assured that they express the deepest de- 
sires, the purest emotions of all human souls. 

The system of the historic Church is one 
of rational religious education. She takes peo- 
ple in childhood, because they are children of 
God, baptizes them, teaches them to pray, con- 
firms them, and makes them, if they will be, 
participants in all her life and worship, the very 
fundamental principle of her system being the 
double nature of man. The whole aim and end 
of her education is not to save men from the 
wrath of an offended Deity remote from them, 
but to bring into complete harmony within them 
the two natures now so often in fierce and bit- 
ter conflict. Looking beyond this world, she 
prophesies of worlds where we may grow more 
freely in light and knowledge, where seeing 
truth no longer darkly, but with clear vision, we 
shall love and follow it, and where, no longer 
torn by conflicting desires, 

" Mind and soul according well, 



May make one music as before, 
But vaster ! " 



CHRIST. 



39 



"The incarnation was historically accomplished in Jesus 
Christ, who was born of the Virgin Mary, and suffered under 
Pontius Pilate. 

1 ' The inward Christ of the heart (of the Church and of each 
believer) presupposes the Christ manifested in history, and 
without the latter soon fades away into a mystic cloud."— 
Martensen. 

" The Council of Nicaea, which declared the union of God 
with man, is one of the most important assemblies that was 
ever convened on this earth ; it dates a new era in the his- 
tory of human thought. God in actual contact with man — 
God in man and man in God — is the underlying idea of the 
Athanasian dogma, which asserts that the Son is consubstan- 
tial with the Father."— Dr. F. H. Hedge, "Ways of the 
Spirit," p. 352, 

" Passing from India to Persia, and thence to Greece, 
where in the hands of Plato it was made much of, the doc- 
trine of the Logos became the prominent feature of the 
famous Neoplatonic school of Alexandria." — " Keys of the 
Creeds." 

" The difference between the prophets and Jesus was, that 
he accomplished what they foresaw. His life full of faith in 
God and man, became the new seed of a higher kingdom 
than that of David. He was the Son of David, as inheriting 
the loving trust of David in a heavenly Father ; he was also 
the Lord of David, by fulfilling David's love to God with his 
own love to man ; making piety and charity one, faith and 
freedom one, reason and religion one, this life and the life to 
come one. He died to accomplish this union and to make 
this atoning sacrifice." — James Freeman Clarke. 

" The revelation of and in the Christ is not a religion, and 
it is not a philosophy. 

******** * 

" The Christ does not come into the world as the founder 
of a religion, and this revelation is not set forth as an insti- 



40 



tute, or a system, or a cultus of religion. — MuLFORD, " Re- 
public of God." 

" It is rather His assumption of our nature in all its fulness, 
than his death alone, that the Fathers dwelt upon. He is the 
representative man, the second Adam, the head of the body, 
who recapitulates in Himself, as they are fond of expressing 
it, the whole human race, and imparts to them — a new prin- 
ciple of life, in whose death all die, in whose resurrection all 
are made alive. This is the great argument of Athanasius." 
— Oxenham, " The Atonement." 

"To believe in the name of Christ is to believe that no 
other approach to God exists, except through the same quali- 
ties of justice, truth, and love which make up the mind of 
Christ. ' Ye believe in God, believe also in me,' is given as 
His own farewell address. Ye believe in the Father, ye be- 
lieve in Religion generally ; believe also in the Son, the 
Christ. For this is the form in which the Divine Nature has 
been made most palpably known to the world, in flesh and 
blood, in facts and words, in life and death." — Dean Stan- 
ley (" Christian Institutions "). 

" The vital principle of the doctrine of the atonement is 
self-surrender. Christ yielded himself perfectly to the Divine 
Will, and so became the world's redeemer. 

' ' All the Fathers agreed, as it were with one mind, that 
to Christ belongs not merely the limited importance attached 
to every historical personage, but that his person stands in an 
essential relation to the whole Human Race ; on this account 
alone could they make a Single Individual the object of an 
article of faith, and ascribe to him a lasting and eternal sig- 
nificancy in relation to our race." — Dorner, "Person of 
Christ." 

' ' Christ saves us by pouring into us his own life, which is 
love. When Christian love is formed within us, it has killed 
the roots of sin in the soul and fitted us co be forgiven, and 
to enter the presence of God." — James Fre*eman Clarke. 



4i 



CHRIST. 

An old painter of the fifteenth century, Fra 
Angelico, used to paint the head of Christ on 
bended knee, and with corresponding rever- 
ence of mind the Saviour's life should be 
studied. 

It may seem presumptuous, after nearly nine- 
teen hundred years of conflicting opinion, to say 
that it is not hard to arrive at true conclusions 
about him ; and if the modern student were 
obliged to seek for his true character and re- 
lation to mankind amid the dense mists of 
scholastic opinion, or the strifes of ecclesiasti- 
cal councils, it would be impossible to say it. 
The doctrine of Christ's divinity, if it be true, 
is to be discovered in far simpler ways. 

Theodore Parker once said : " Above all 
men do I bow myself before that august 
personage, Jesus of Nazareth, who seems to 
have had the strength of man and the softness 
of woman, — man's mighty, wide, grasping, rea- 

43 



44 Heart of the Creeds. 

soning, calculating, and poetic mind ; and wo- 
man's conscience, woman's heart, and woman's 
faith in God. He is my best historic ideal of 
human greatness." How much such a confes- 
sion as that reminds us of the simple-hearted, 
yet deep and ardent love for him, that inspired 
Christ's first disciples ! There is a great gulf be- 
tween their faith and admiration and that of the 
men who composed the Council of Nicaea, which, 
in the year 325, established on a dogmatic basis 
the Church's belief in his divinity ; and this 
modern utterance of one who loved the undog- 
matic faith of St. John and St. Peter, but cared 
little for the formulated opinions of the bishops 
of the fourth century, carries us back to the 
first flush of the world's new spiritual day. 

Two questions in this chapter demand our 
attention : first, the nature of Christ ; second, 
his work. 

The Catholic Church, ever since the Council 
of Nicaea, has persistently declared her belief in 
the double nature of Christ. It was the denial 
of his divinity by the Arians that led to the 
Nicene Council, whose stormy vote decided 
that henceforth the Church should hold and 
teach the doctrine of his double nature. After 



Christ. 45 

that council other sects arose denying his com- 
plete humanity, and although the echo of all 
such strifes has long since died away, many 
people are still in doubt whether Christ was 
both God and man. Can that question be set- 
tled rationally and beyond the sphere of mere 
theological assertion ? Let us see. The Chris- 
tian world to-day contains but two leading 
forms of statement concerning Christ's nature: 
that of the Catholic Church, to which we have 
referred ; and that of the Unitarians, which is, 
in general, an assertion simply of his human 
nature. And in many minds there is an im- 
pression that the separation between the beliefs 
indicated by these two forms of statement, is 
as wide and deep as that between the beliefs of 
the Church and the Arians in the fourth cen- 
tury. This is not always true. The early 
Arians were people influenced by the current 
teaching of the East concerning God. Arius 
himself was bred, not in the Christian school of 
Alexandria, but in that of Antioch, a school 
tinctured with the Oriental view of God as re- 
mote from His universe and acting upon it 
only by means of intermediate agencies. In 
the Oriental view there was no point of contact 



46 Heart of the Creeds. 

between God and the universe ; such a thought 
as that He was the indwelling life of nature and 
the personality of man, never for a moment 
entered into it. They had discovered no 
natural tie between the human and the divine, 
and so the idea of the perfect incarnation of 
God in Christ, to which the Alexandrian view 
of God as incarnate in all men logically and 
quickly led the Church, was impossible for the 
Arian mind to grasp. Thus the early strife 
concerning Christ's divinity was, in reality, a 
strife about the more fundamental doctrine 
of the nature of God. The Alexandrian theo- 
logians regarded God as immediately present 
in His universe, not in the uncommunicable- 
ness and entire profoundness of His nature 
and power, but as the logos or reason in which 
every human being shared. Fie did not exist 
in solitary greatness, but in complex and beau- 
tiful relationships. Reason in the intellect and 
goodness in the soul of man both testified to 
His abiding presence in the race. And when 
" The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, 
full of grace and truth," it was only in pursu- 
ance of the regular manifestation or revelation 
of Deity. God and man had never existed 



Christ. 47 

apart, one " in heaven/' the other "on the 
earth," except in figurative language, used to 
portray the respective greatness and littleness 
of divine and human attributes. Christ was 
the perfect type or head of the visible incarna- 
tion of God, the highest point in the divine 
communication to the intellect and heart of 
man. In him was that perfect union of divine 
and human of which the constitution of the 
world and man had always been prophesying. 
" He was the light that lighteth every man that 
cometh into the world." He had not alone 
the divine nature, else he would have been 
like those mythical gods whom the Orientals 
conceived of as sometimes walking the earth 
in human guise, and so would have taken the 
world back to heathen polytheism. He had 
not alone the human nature, else his appear- 
ance in the world would have destroyed the es- 
sential principle on which all true philosophy 
of the relations between God and humanity is 
based. He calls himself both Son of God and 
Son of man. He tells the Jews that no sign 
shall be given them but the sign of the Son of 
man; that is, that he had come to establish 
truth, not by means of " portent and prodigy," 



48 Heart of the Creeds. 

but by means of revelation in a person ; that 
his mission was to declare the eternal, inde- 
structible relationship between God and man. 

In tracing the doctrine of God we have al- 
ready seen how, after Augustine's time, the 
Oriental view of God as existing apart from the 
world, an awful remoteness, came to be gen- 
erally held in the Western Church ; and it 
thus becomes most clear that the doctrine of 
Christ's divinity would necessarily appear in 
the later theology, under an entirely different 
aspect. 

As a matter of fact the doctrine of the in- 
carnation, rich and beautiful in the Alexandrian 
theology, did harden soon into a cold and re- 
pulsive dogma closely allied to the older beliefs 
of the heathen in the appearance of gods on 
earth, the fruitful source of strife and division 
and cruel persecution in the Church. In the 
Western Church, Christ was not the perfect 
type of creation, the complete embodiment 
of the divine principle in man, the head- 
stone in the temple of God's Incarnate Life, 
into which all are builded, but rather a myste- 
rious being, who came to earth to declare judg- 
ment, and to ward off dreadful punishment from 



Christ. 49 

a portion of the race by offering his body as a 
literal sacrifice to offended Deity. 

This, briefly stated, is the doctrine of Christ 
that Calvinism has handed down to us, and who 
can describe the painful struggles of mind it pro- 
duced, age after age, among those who more or 
less clearly perceived that it could not be har- 
monized with reason or the better instincts of 
the soul ? Turn whichever way they would, in 
the direction of a natural and reasonable faith, 
they were confronted with such passages as : 
"Neither is there salvation in any other; for 
there is none other name under heaven given 
among men whereby we must be saved." 
" He that believeth on the Son hath eternal 
life, and he that believeth not the Son of God 
shall not see life." And they said: " If in these 
passages Christ, or the Son of God, means simply 
the historic Christ, the divine man of Palestine, 
how can salvation be justly limited to belief in 
him, since millions of the inhabitants of the 
earth, before he lived and since, never heard 
nor could have known of him ? And what 
does belief in him mean ? Can it mean merely 
some particular belief about him formed in the 
mind, or submission to the laws and institu- 



50 Heart of the Creeds. 

tions of the Christian Church?" These were 
questions to which the Mediaeval and post- 
Reformation churches of Europe could give no 
answer satisfactory to thoughtful minds. It was 
clear that salvation, whatever it meant, could not 
reasonably have been made dependent on the 
opinions people held about Christ, nor on the 
administration of the external rite of baptism. 
There was always a lurking conviction that God 
could be just to man only by making well-being 
or ill-being depend on something man could do 
or refrain from doing, something that took far 
deeper hold on the roots of life than mere 
speculation concerning Christ, or an uncertain 
state of the emotions connected with that, or 
on baptism or the Lord's Supper. What, then, 
was the true belief in Christ that was so neces- 
sary to man ? The answer would have been 
found, had people looked for it, in the writings 
of some of the most orthodox of the Apos- 
tolic and Church Fathers. 

Justin Martyr's plain declaration was that 
" Christ is the Word of whom the whole human 
race are partakers " ; that " those who lived 

m 

according to reason" were Christians, " though 
accounted atheists," even as those who " lived 



Christ. 5 1 

without reason were enemies " to Christ ; and 
that each man of the heathen writers " spoke 
well in proportion to the share he had " of the 
Word of God in him. Clement of Alexandria 
had said : " The Son of God is never displaced ; 
not being divided, not severed, not passing 
from place to place ; being always everywhere, 
and being contained nowhere ; complete mind 
the complete paternal light ; the teacher who 
trains the Gnostic by mysteries, and the be- 
liever by good hopes, and the hard of heart by 
corrective discipline." " Christ is called Wis- 
dom by the prophets. This is he who is 
the teacher of all created beings the fellow- 
counsellor of God, who foreknew all things." 
" There was always a natural manifestation of 
the One Almighty God among all right-thinking 
men." " He whom we call Saviour and Lord 
gave philosophy to the Greeks. He has dis- 
pensed his beneficence both to Greeks and 
Barbarians." " For the image of God is His 
Word, the genuine Son of Mind, the Divine 
Word, the archetypal light of light," 

Origen had said : " Christ has given light 
and taught the way of piety to the whole 
human race, so that no one can reproach 



52 Heart of the Creeds. 

him if he remain without a share of his mys- 
teries." 

This was the orthodox doctrine of Christ, in 
the most enlightened portion of the Christian 
Church, before the time of Augustine ; and it 
is this to which the Church in our day is re- 
turning. In the largest sense Christ is the 
divine Word or reason or wisdom of God, 
manifest in the constitution of the universe, 
and most perfectly in the nature of man. He 
is that of God which we can comprehend, and 
by means of which we stand forever related to 
the unrevealed mystery of the Divine Nature. 
He is indeed the Mediator between God and 
man, not, however, as trying to win God over 
to our side, but as in his nature " the eternal 
logos of the world through whom the divine 
light shines into creation " ; " the ground and 
source of all reason in creation, be it in men or 
angels, in Greek or Jew." 1 

From such statements as these we shall at 
once see the necessity for the modern distinc- 
tion between the essential and the historic Christ. 
The historic Christ, the God-man of Palestine, 
who was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered 

1 Martensen. 



Christ. 53 

under Pontius Pilate, was crucified dead and 
buried, and rose again from the dead, was the 
perfect manifestation of the essential Christ 
incarnate from the beginning of the world. 
" Christ lives in the heart of the Church and of 
each believer," says Martensen, " but the in- 
ward Christ of the heart presupposes the Christ 
manifested in history, and without the latter 
soon fades away into a mystic cloud." 

It would hardly be profitable to discuss, at 
length, the various theories that have been held 
in explanation or definition of the work of 
Christ. 

Most of the theological treatises with which 
people are familiar, and many of the pul- 
pits, teach an erroneous doctrine of what is 
called " substitutionary atonement," and it is 
this principle of substitution or quid pro quo, 
that enters into most of the mediaeval and re- 
formed theories of the work of Christ. 

For man's sin, those theories declared, justice 
demanded satisfaction ; outraged law must 
be vindicated ; God's wrath must be appeased. 
Yet Infinite Love could save the victims, if it 
would yield itself to that which would, other- 
wise, relentlessly fall upon them. So love and 



54 Heart of the Creeds. 

justice met in conference, and bargained that 
love, in the person of Christ, should come to 
earth and submit itself to the pains of physical 
death, in order to pay man's ransom. 

No form of this substitution doctrine could 
possibly satisfy the minds of the best thinkers. 
The human reason revolted at the grotesque 
spectacle of a God at war with Himself, de- 
manding man's utter ruin, yet willing to be 
pacified if some victim could be found to take 
the offender's place, and so bargaining with 
Himself, or with the devil, for men's salvation. 
And the question kept recurring how spiritual 
wrong could be atoned by physical suffering or, 
as in heathen sacrifices, by the mere shedding 
of blood ? Or how the sufferings of Christ for 
a few brief hours could, by any possibility, be 
regarded as an equivalent for unending ages of 
torture too dreadful to be imagined, for the 
whole race, in the life to come ? Yet this, in 
one form or another, was the doctrine that was 
almost universally preached and professedly 
believed in New England until about half a 
century ago, when a large body of thinking 
men, under the name of Unitarians, rose in re- 
volt against it and the popular crude and un- 



Christ. 5 5 

philosophical doctrines of Trinity, Divinity of 
Christ, and Heaven and hell connected with it. 

After what has been said concerning the be- 
lief of the early Church about Christ's nature, 
it will not be necessary to show how far re- 
moved from early Christian thought this view 
of the atonement was. The New Testament 
writers, full of enthusiasm over their Lord and 
his divine work, seized all the strongest figures 
they were familiar with, in order to express 
what they felt of the value of his life and 
death, but they held no dogmatic theories of 
the sacrifice of the Son of God, least of all 
such theories as were imposed upon the Church 
in later ages by the Augustinian theology. 

Nor among the Fathers of the Church, in 
the third and fourth centuries, can there be said 
to have been any well-defined doctrine of 
atonement, while, indeed, all believed pro- 
foundly in the sacrifice of Christ, and spoke 
rhetorically of his life and death as having 
been for man's redemption. 

We believe that Christ redeemed the world, 
not by suffering a penalty that except for 
him man must have borne, but first, by re- 
vealing, in his own divine-human nature, the 



56 Heart of the Creeds. 

fact of God's enshrinement in the universe 
and the soul of man ; and second, by realiz- 
ing in history, once for all, the perfect union 
of divine and human, and so the ideal, that 
man had long been struggling for and hop- 
ing to see realized, of perfect life. The death 
from which he saved man was the spiritual 
blight of sordidness and sensuality and false 
beliefs. The salvation he wrought was the 
" liberation of the God consciousness " in 
men from the slavery to sense in which it is 
so greatly held. The sacrifice of the cross 
not only typifies, but is the great tide-mark of 
that eternal sacrifice of the lower to the higher 
through which the universe and the soul of 
man struggle ever upward toward perfection. 

The word salvation is as often on our lips to- 
day as ever, but we mean now, by salvation, 
not deliverance from fiery tortures in the life 
to come, but the gradually increasing perfec- 
tion of our natures in all worlds where we may 
be. We speak of the atonement of Christ, 
but we mean by that, not the satisfying of an 
offended deity by a dreadful offering of human 
blood, but the revelation of the light and free- 
dom of the obedient soul, which came through 



Christ. 5 7 

Christ. The redemption of the world, we be- 
lieve, lies in the truth that " in him was life, and 
the life was the light of men." That " the Word 
became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we be- 
held his glory, glory as of the only begotten 
from the Father), full of grace and truth." 
Thus we believe in Christ, not as man, but as 
God-Man, head and type of creation, eldest 
brother of all the great family of mankind to 
whom God has imparted Himself, liberator of 
the human soul, redeemer of the race from sin. 
We hold that in his divinity every one, how- 
ever defective his philosophy may be, who, 
loving reason and goodness and faith, seeks the 
liberation of his own soul from sin, truly be- 
lieves. 

The obstacle to a frank avowal of belief in 
the divinity, or deity, of Christ has always 
been a mistaken conception of God. The best 
thinkers have never personified God as a great 
man and localized Him in the distant heavens. 
To them God has been ever present in His 
children and His works, and they have had no 
difficulty in thinking of Him as manifesting 
Himself preeminently in Jesus. We love and 
admire the flowers in our gardens, and feel that 



5 8 Heart of the Creeds. 

they all reveal somewhat of that wondrous per- 
fection of beauty that exists in God. But when 
one more rare and beautiful than the others 
unfolds its petals and spreads its perfumes 
lavishly abroad, we feel almost like worshipping 
that as a complete revelation of Infinite Beauty. 
When the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
calls Christ " the brightness of God's glory, and 
the express image of His person," or when St. 
Paul says that " he is the image of the invisible 
God," and that " it pleased the Father that in 
him should all fulness dwell," we have a similar 
exhibition of feeling. It was not Christ in his 
single personality that kindled the fervid apos- 
tolic imagination to so a bright a glow, but 
rather Christ as " unveiling God in the world 
and in the consciousness of man," Christ in his 
union with other men, of whom St. Paul had 
elsewhere said (i Cor. xi., 7) that they were 
" the image and glory of God." 

On summer mornings as we watch the sun 
rise out of gold and crimson seas and mount 
proudly upward into the heavens " trailing 
clouds of glory as he comes," we understand 
how Tennyson could write, " God made himself 
an awful rose of dawn," for it seems to us that 



Christ, 59 

He has wholly incarnated himself in that glorious 
vision. Lost in contemplation of the divine 
man who reveals to men not only their duty 
and destiny, but, in his oneness with them, their 
divine relationship, how natural to feel that he 
is the image and glory of God. As we stand 
face to face with him, how can we better express 
our belief in the one perfect human char- 
acter, the man who alone of all men could 
truthfully say as he looked into his inner life, 
There is no shadow of evil on my soul, than to 
repeat his own words : " I and my Father are 
one. 

In confessing our belief in the sacrifice of 
Christ, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
world, we are confessing belief in the subordi- 
nation of the lower to the higher, the universal 
sacrifice once historically, sublimely, and fully 
witnessed in the life and death of Jesus in Pal- 
estine. 

Thus there are to-day many who piously 
repeat the Nicene Creed who, judged by the 
standard of the oldest and truest orthodoxy of 
the Catholic Church, are farthest from belief in 
the divinity of our Lord ; while there are many 
who never say the Creeds who, at heart, are the 



60 Heart of the Creeds. 

strongest believers in the fact. A clergyman of 
the English Church once quaintly said : " Divine 
truth is better understood, as it unfolds itself 
in the purity of men's hearts and lives, than in 
all those subtle niceties into which curious wits 
may lay it forth " ; and there is the echo of the 
Master's own spirit in Whittier's lines : 

" Call him not heretic whose works attest 
His faith in goodness by no creed confessed. 
Whatever in love's name is truly done 
To free the bound and lift the fallen one 
Is done in Christ. Whoso, in deed and word, 
Is not against him, labors for our Lord. 
When he who, sad and weary, longing sore 
For love's sweet service, sought the sisters' door, 
One saw the heavenly, one the human guest. 
But who shall say which loved the Master best ? " 



THE CREEDS. 



6z 



" As the name of the Father represents to us God in nature, 
as the name of the Son represents to us God in history ; so 
the name of the Holy Ghost represents to us God in our own 
hearts and spirits and consciences. This is the still, small 
voice — stillest and smallest, yet loudest and strongest of all — 
which, even more than the wonders of nature or the wonders 
of history, brings us into the nearest harmony with Him who 
is a Spirit, — who, when His closest communion with man is 
described, can only be described as the Spirit pleading with, 
and dwelling in, our spirit." — Dean Stanley, "Christian 
Institutions." 

"Christianity, though a monotheism, and a monotheism 
which has destroyed forever both polytheism and idolatry 
wherever it has gone, is not that of numerical unity. The 
God of Christianity differs in this from the God of Judaism 
and Mohammedanism. He is an infinite will ; but he is 
more. Christianity cognizes God as not only above nature 
and the soul, but also a^ in nature and in the soul. 

"He is an omnipresent will as the Father, Creator, and 
Ruler of all things. He is the Word, or manifested Truth in 
the Son, manifested through all nature, manifested through 
all human life. He is the Spirit or inspiration of each indi- 
vidual soul. So he is Father, Son, and Spirit, above all, 
through all, and in us all." — James Freeman Clarke. 

" In the Apostolic Creed we breathe the atmosphere of 
fact rather than of doctrine, and surely if its witness is accept- 
ed in all its length and breadth and depth, it will be found to 
be not only a rallying-point for all who love the Lord Jesus 
Christ in sincerity, but also will supply the truest and most 



62 



powerful corrective for the errors and follies of our times." — 
Rev. Stanley Leathes, M.A. 

"In early Trinitarian discussions, we cannot mistake the 
presence of a yet higher aim, — that, viz., of bringing to dis- 
tinct consciousness not only the unity of the divine nature, 
but also the living longing of divine love to impart itself ; in 
other words, the effort to maintain both the translucent 
nature of God and his immanence in his works, — the former in 
opposition to polytheism and pantheism, and the latter to an 
abstract deism. So far such formulas have also their edifying 
side, as giving witness to the struggle of the Christian mind 
after a satisfactory expression of what has its full reality only 
in the depths of the Christian heart. — Hagenbach, " History 
of Doctrines," vol. i., p. 270. 

" To exist in relationship is the essential idea of God." — 
Prof. A. V. G. Allen, D.D., "Continuity of Christian 
Thought." 

" God the Father is the ground of creation, 
God the Son is the law of creation, 
God the Holy Ghost is the life of creation. 

" God the Father originates, 
God the Son regulates, 
God the Holy Ghost actuates. 

" God the Father is Deity invisible, 
God the Son is Deity manifested, 
God the Holy Ghost is Deity communicated." 

—Rev. H. V. D. Johns, D.D. 
(Recently reprinted in the New York Churchman.') 



63 



THE CREEDS. 

Close together in the Prayer Book stand two 
venerable Creeds, or short Confessions of Faith, 
which are used interchangeably in public wor- 
ship, — the Apostles and the Nicene. These two 
Creeds are always said to embody the substance 
of Christian belief, and in the Protestant Epis- 
copal Church there is no standard of doctrine 
whatsoever besidethem. TheChurchin England 
at the time of the Reformation, following the 
Reformed Churches of the Continent, adopted 
a code of thirty-nine articles, which have no 
doubt often hampered her progress and dis- 
turbed the consciences of her clergy compelled 
by law to subscribe them. The organizers of 
our Church, knowing that however unnecessary 
these articles might be, or however faulty in 
expression, still, like the Catholic Creeds them- 
selves, they contained the substance of all true 
religious belief, decided to retain them in the 
Prayer Book as an historical document, not to 

65 



66 Heart of the Creeds. 

be formally subscribed by ministers or people, 
but rather to indicate the close relationship 
between the Church in England and America. 

There seems no sufficient reason, as we re- 
gard them, why the broadest thinker should 
not feel able to subscribe them as a whole, but 
in point of fact they stand in the back of our 
Prayer Book as a witness to our spiritual descent 
as Churchmen, a document serving to remind 
us of the crisis the Church went through in the 
sixteenth century, and of the debt of religious 
freedom we owe the English Reformers. 

The only doctrinal standards we have are 
contained in the two Creeds, the shorter of 
which, from a legend that each of the twelve 
Apostles contributed a clause, is commonly 
called the Apostles' Creed, the longer, made 
in its original form by the Council of Nicea 
in the year 325, and afterward added to, the 
Nicene. The Apostles' Creed was probably 
formed by combining the various simple Con- 
fessions of Faith used in the Early Church by 
those who were admitted to baptism, and it 
came into general use in the Latin Church ; 
while the Nicene, formed on the basis of an 
earlier Creed in use in the Church in Palestine, 



The Creeds, 67 

and, much more than the Apostles', the product 
of speculative thought, became distinctively 
the Creed of the Eastern Church. 1 " But there 
is one point," says Dean Stanley, " which the 
two Creeds have in common. It is the frame- 
work on which they are formed. The frame- 
work is the simple expression of faith used in the 
Baptism of the early Christians. It is taken from 
the First Gospel, and it consists of l the name 
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.' ' 
At first it was common to use simply the 
name of Christ in the profession of Christian- 
ity, but that was soon superseded by the Trin- 
itarian formulary found in the twenty-eighth 
chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and in 
the second century the latter became universal. 
The use of this formulary in baptism antedates 
all the discussions recorded in Church History 
concerning the doctrine of the Trinity, which, 
at last, in the latter part of the fourth century, 
became fully settled as a symbol or mode of 
expression of the belief of the Church. The 
history of these discussions is instructive, as 

1 The history of the origin of the Nicene Creed will be 
found in detail in Dean Stanley's " History of the Eastern 
Church." 



68 Heart of the Creeds. 

showing how impossible it often is for people of 
mystical and speculative, and people of logical 
and practical tendencies of thought to under- 
stand each other. The heretics of that early 
time were often heretics simply because a dif- 
ferent philosophical training had made it im- 
possible for them to enter into all the subtle- 
ties of the thought of their orthodox oppo- 
nents, while many of their persecutions were 
the result of the failure of the Church party to 
see the difference between religion and their 
peculiar thought about religion. 

The doctrine of the Trinity is the framework 
of the Creeds, but it is not a doctrine originat- 
ing with or peculiar to Christianity. Triads 
and Trinities belong to many of the religious 
and philosophical systems of earlier and later 
times, and the Trinitarian symbol of Christian- 
ity we may with little hesitation trace imme- 
diately to a Greek source. 

The following paragraph from a little book 
called " The Keys of the Creeds " is very sug- 
gestive, as indicating some of the steps by which 
the symbol reached the early Christian Church. 

"The School of Alexandria added a new 
Trinity to those already received in Egypt. 



The Creeds. 69 

This new Trinity was based on an analysis of 
the functions of the individual man. Every 
living being consists of a trinity; the individual 
self; the mind ; and the life . . . projecting 
the individual man into the ideal, and di- 
vesting him of limitations, the Neoplatonists 
presented their Trinity as consisting of three 
Persons, of whom the first was unity, infinite 
and perfect, but capable of generating exist- 
ence. The second person was subordinate to 
the first, but was the most perfect of all gen- 
erated beings. It was called the Intelligence, 
Wisdom, or Word, — Logos, a Greek term, by a 
happy coincidence signifying both reason and 
speech. The third person was the universal 
Spirit, Soul, or Life. It was only through the 
Word that God the Father could be known, as 
a man's mind can only be known through his 
speech. The Word was thus the interpreter or 
Mediator between God and man. The leading 
apostle of this philosophy was a Jew, named 
Philo, who was born about B.C. 30. 1 He was 

1 Philo lived in Alexandria, the most intellectual centre of 
the Eastern world, at the time when Christian doctrines were 
moulding, and there can be little doubt of the strong influence 
he and his school exerted on the intellectual spirit and form 
of early Catholic theology. 



Jo Heart of the Creeds. 

at once an enthusiastic disciple of Plato, and 
an ardent Jew after the pattern of the later and 
more spiritual type. His countrymen, grow- 
ing in spiritual graces since the captivity, had 
long been familiar with the idea of the Logos, 
whom they personified under the name of Wis- 
dom." — (" Keys of the Creeds," p 87.) 

However the number three first came to be 
used as a mystic or sacred number, its use as 
such is very ancient, and is intended to convey 
the idea of completeness. In Christianity it 
denotes the completeness of the nature of God 
and His relations with mankind, and so impos- 
sible does the ordinary mind find it to symbol- 
ize God under the figure of unity alone, and so 
naturally does the idea of completeness take 
shape as threefoldness, that there seems little 
probability, no matter how far or fast scientific 
thought may progress, that the Christian sym- 
bol of the Trinity shall disappear. Not more 
from regard for an ancient and venerable sym- 
bol, than from a sense of its value in keeping 
before the minds of men the largeness and rich- 
ness of the divine nature and revelation, do 
Christian thinkers hold and value it. 

This deeper and profounder significance of 



The Creeds. 71 

the doctrine of the Trinity was felt by the 
Alexandrian theologians and by Athanasius, the 
great champion of Catholic orthodoxy. But in 
the Latin Church the doctrine soon hardened 
into what seems very like belief in three gods, 
and in the popular Calvinistic theology of 
New England there can be no doubt that a be- 
lief very nearly allied to heathen polytheism pre- 
vailed. The popular mind conceived of a God 
of justice, a God of love, and another God, subor- 
dinate to these two, on whom they both relied to 
carry out their plans. The Unitarian protest- 
ants, keenly alive to the outrage Calvinistic the- 
ology had done to the divine truths written in 
man's intellect and heart, yet blind to the evolu- 
tion of religion, and the intrinsic value of the 
religious symbols Calvinism had either per- 
verted or thrown away, and lacking the catholic 
spirit of the older churches of Christendom, cast 
this symbol aside as a sign of unenlightened 
thought, and from that time to the present they 
and their descendants have done without it. 

So far from being a sign of narrow or mis- 
taken thought, the Trinitarian symbol is un- 
doubtedly a great help and stimulus to pro- 
found and rational beliefs concerning God ; and 



72 Heart of the Creeds. 

even the Unitarian body, which in many places 
has outlived much of the aggressive spirit with 
which it naturally began, and has mellowed and 
softened with time, has quite ceased to protest 
against it. 

The doctrine of the Trinity is the basis or 
framework of the Creeds, although the symbol 
is nowhere directly referred to in them. Saying 
them we confess our belief in God as Father, 
Son, and Holy Spirit, and this is the sum of our 
statement of belief, for the latter clauses of 
the Creeds, which relate to the Holy Catholic 
Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgive- 
ness of Sins, are still further declarations of 
belief in the Holy Spirit, the third Person in the 
Trinity. We believe in one God in three Per- 
sons ; but what do we mean by the word person 
as applied to God? We clearly do not mean 
that God is a person as we are persons. A 
Being whose nature has no limitations, to whose 
attributes of thought and will there are no 
bounds, must be very far removed from us, with 
our imperfect thought and feeble power of will 
and many limitations. The personality of God, 
like our own, is based on conscious thought, 
intelligence, and implies the power to will, but 



The Creeds. 73 

in God thought and will are perfect and com- 
plete. Yet God exists not in solitary infi- 
niteness, lonely perfection of personality, but 
in self-manifestation, in relations. There are 
mysterious depths of being in Him that we 
have received only faint suggestions of, but if 
He existed in cold, abstract unity we could never 
know Him at all. He would forever remain to 
us the incomprehensible and unthinkable source 
from which all things proceed, never to be 
named nor known, — an Infinite Father, but an 
Infinite Silence as well. God cannot exist in 
absolute mystery. His nature requires self-rev- 
elation, and He has revealed Himself. Speech 
has come out of the Silence, and that speech, 
God's thought, the Logos (both reason and 
speech) — all of God that can be named and 
known, — is the Revelation of the Son. In hu- 
manity that revelation is most intelligible, most 
complete, and in Jesus, the Christ of history, it 
culminates, and at last is grandly summed up. 

Nor can God cease to create. From Him 
continually comes forth creative and sustaining 
power. He causes death, and out of death 
brings nobler forms of life. He hath created 
the heavens and stretched them out ; He hath 



74 Heart of the Creeds. 

spread forth the earth and that which comet h out 
of it ; and still the creation drama ceases not, 
for He giveth breath unto the people upon it, and 
spirit to them that walk therein. Along with the 
speech of God goes ever the manifestation of His 
power, which is the revelation of the Spirit. 

Thus we have God in three persons or char- 
acters, back of and revealing itself through 
each of which, is the Divine Personality, the 
Infinite Intelligence. Back of the Silence is 
God, back of the Speech is God, and back of 
the Power is God. 

Canon Liddon, " Bampton Lectures," p. 49, 
says : " That three such distinctions (having their 
basis in the Essence of the Godhead) exist, is a 
matter of Revelation. In the common language 
of the Western Church, these distinct Forms 
of Being are named Persons. Yet that term 
cannot be employed to denote them without 
considerable intellectual caution." The Latin 
word persona, as is well known, originally meant 
the mask or character the player on the stage 
assumed, but in time it came to denote an indi- 
vidual of a species. Thus, when it was finally 
used in theology to represent the original Greek 
word hypostasis, which meant not an individual 



The Creeds. 75 

of a class, but a Distinction in the Essence of 
God, it could not fail to mislead. " The con- 
ception of species," Canon Liddon says, " is 
utterly inapplicable to that One Supreme 
Essence which we name God." 

There are many aspects under which this 
threefoldness of God's nature, and so the doc- 
trine of the Trinity which beautifully yet feebly 
tries to express it, may be regarded. Dean 
Stanley says that the whole faith of Natural 
Religion, the faith of the Natural Conscience, is 
indicated by the name of the Father ; Histori- 
cal Religion, or the Faith of the Christian 
Church, God in history, in man, and above all in 
Jesus Christ, by the name of the Son ; and 
Spiritual Religion, or God in our own hearts 
and spirits and consciences, by the name of the 
Holy Spirit. 

Wherever among men we find any sense of 
awe or mystery, any aspiration of soul after 
truth and goodness, any dissatisfaction with that 
which is low, base, vile, any — however feeble — 
groping after spiritual light, we have the rev- 
elation of God the Father. Wherever we find 
the human feeling of the brotherhood of man- 
kind, wherever in men's natures, we see re- 



j6 Heart of the Creeds. 

fleeted the wisdom and strength and forbear- 
ance and tenderness of God, or find the spirit 
of loving, religious sympathy drawing people 
together in organized societies for worship and 
charitable works, we have a revelation of God 
the Son. Wherever we find men conscious of 
a power of righteousness within them, strug- 
gling to free their natures from captivity to sin, 
pleading with them to be true to duty, to fol- 
low charity and faith and patience, honesty and 
purity and love with all men ; wherever in the 
Church we see a spirit of earnest faith that 
triumphs over false and narrow prejudices and 
keeps religious life in its true place, above form, 
we have a revelation of God the Holy Spirit. 
It would be hard to see how the world could do 
without either view of God. Dean Stanley 
says : " To acknowledge this triple form of 
revelation, to acknowledge this complex aspect 
of Deity, as it runs through the multiform ex- 
pressions of the Bible, saves, as it were, the 
reverence due to the Almighty Ruler of the 
universe, tends to preserve the balance of truth 
from any partial or polemical bias, presents to 
us not a meagre, fragmentary view of only one 
part of the Divine mind, but a wide, Catholic 



The Creeds. 77 

summary of the whole, so far as nature, history, 
and experience permit. If we cease to think 
of the Universal Father, we become narrow and 
exclusive. If we cease to think of the Founder 
of Christianity ' and of the grandeur of Chris- 
tendom, we lose our hold on the great historic 
events which have swayed the hopes and affec- 
tions of man in the highest moments of human 
progress. If we cease to think of the Spirit, 
we lose the inmost meaning of Creed and 
Prayer, of Church and Bible, of human char- 
acter and of vital religion." 

In i860, Charles Kingsley, who, with Maurice 
and others, was deeply distressed over the fail- 
ure of the Tractarian leaders, such as Pusey and 
Newman on the one side, and the Evangelical 
leaders on the other, to point out the deeper 
principles and make clear the rational basis of 
religious thought, wrote his novel " Yeast." 
The book traces the intellectual and moral 
development of Lancelot Smith, a young Eng- 
lishman, educated under Evangelical influence, 

1 When we say of Jesus " Conceived of the Holy Ghost, 
born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was 
crucified, dead and buried, and went into the place of departed 
spirits" we simply mean to declare our belief in the facts 
of his history whatever they are. 



7 8 Heart of the Creeds. 

and now skeptical of his early mistaken opin- 
ions. At one of the crises of his life he is found 
in St. Paul's Cathedral talking with an Asiatic- 
Christian philosopher. " Who is He to whom 
you ask me to turn ? " Lancelot says. " You 
talk to me of Him as my Father; but you talk 
of Him to men of your own Creed as the 
Father. You have mysterious dogmas of three 
in one. I know them — I have admired them in 
all their forms, in the Vedas, in the Neo Pla- 
tonists, in Jacob Boehmen, in your Catholic 
Creeds, in Coleridge, and in the Germans, from 
whom he borrowed them. I have looked at 
them, and found in them beautiful phantasms 
of philosophy — all but scientific necessities, — 

but " "But what?" answers the sage. 

And Lancelot says : "I do not want cold, ab- 
stract necessities of logic ; I want living, practi- 
cal facts. If those mysterious dogmas speak of 
real and necessary properties of His being, they 
must be necessarily interwoven in practice with 
His revelation of Himself." Then the Chris- 
tian philosopher says, in substance, for we do 
not quote the words : Have you not felt the 
necessity for an All-Father, the Father of Per- 
sons, and so Himself the source of personality, 



The Creeds. 79 

the fulfilment of our fitful and broken dreams 
of power, wisdom, creative energy, love, justice, 
pity ? Have you not always been conscious of 
the imperfections of your own, the common 
manhood, and in your own consciousness al- 
ways been holding, perhaps unconsciously, to a 
perfect human ideal, a perfect sonhood, a per- 
fect human expression of the God above and 
the God in humanity? And have you not, in 
all your failures to keep your life a perfectly 
united life, in all your ignorance, passion, want 
of will, in all the confusion and helplessness of 
your soul, felt the need of a Divine Spirit to 
unify and give order to that which was so con- 
fused and helpless ? 

The doctrine of the Trinity Kingsley means 
to say is just what we would find any such doc- 
trine, full of vitality, and richly suggestive of all 
the deepest and tenderest in human thought 
concerning God and the soul's life in God. 

As a matter of fact, the threefold revelation 
of God, having come to the world slowly and in 
the fulness of time, not only can never be lost, 
but belief in it is in no sense limited even now 
to those Christians who retain the Trinitarian 
symbol. Opposition to the symbol first arose 



80 Heart of the Creeds. 

because its rich and beautiful significance had 
been obscured and hardened, but forthis mistake 
the Latin Church and the Calvinists should be 
rather pitied than blamed, and it is clear that 
Christians of to-day are in no wise responsible 
for it. Therefore to keep up and apologize for 
divisions in the Household of Faith on the plea 
of an old-time abuse of the doctrine of the Trin- 
ity, is not only foolish but wrong. The cause 
of the breach between Unitarian and Trinitarian 
is no longer, what it once was, a radical difference 
of conception of divine things, for both have 
grown wiser and more enlightened in half a 
century, and both may now, if they will, wor- 
ship with the same venerable forms and express 
their faith by means of the same time-honored 
symbols. 

As to the doctrinal symbol of the Trinity, 
since every truly religious man is of necessity a 
Trinitarian, there is reason to believe that in 
time even it shall be restored to its wonted place 
in the regard of all Christian men. The fact that 
we now need to make clear to ourselves is that 
we all believe in God as Father, Son, and Spirit. 
Sometimes as we think about Him He appeals 
to us most in one aspect, sometimes most in 



The Creeds. 81 

another, but from no thought of ours about 
Him is either aspect wholly absent. When we 
pray, it is with the sense of either His Father- 
hood, His Sonhood, or His Spirithood present 
with us, and in our dark and sorrowful hours 
one thought or the other about Him is sure to 
give us peace. Sometimes we need to be awed 
with the majesty and mystery of God; some- 
times to be soothed and cheered with the ten- 
derness and patience and pity of God ; some- 
times to be quickened and strengthened with 
His indwelling Power. Sometimes we need to 
make clearer to ourselves not only that God is 
great and perfect, but that He is the source of 
all human greatness and goodness ; sometimes 
to fix our minds less on theology and meta- 
physics than on homely virtues and homely 
tasks and the Christian courtesies and kindnesses 
that make life sweet and pleasant ; sometimes 
to feel not the stirring within us of great pow- 
ers, but the quickening of weak faith and desire 
for the right, and the enlightenment of dark- 
ened conscience. 

All these thoughts and many more are en- 
folded in those richly suggestive, yet brief and 
comprehensive symbols, the Creeds of the 



82 Heart of the Creeds. 

Church. When we use them, we must remem- 
ber that they mean to express all the most true 
and inspiring facts of divine and human life and 
the relations between God and man. In the 
various parts of the Prayer Book, sometimes the 
prayers are addressed to the Father, sometimes, 
as in most of the Litany, to the Son, sometimes 
to the Holy Ghost ; and this richness and 
variety in the devotional spirit of the Prayer 
Book is one thing for which we should most 
highly love and value it. The aim of the Trini- 
tarian symbol itself is to keep religion from 
becoming barren or perverted, and, as with all 
religious symbols, its power to do this is the 
true measure of its worth. 



THE BIBLE. 



83 



" The main thing for us is to ascertain the meaning to 
which the words (of Scripture) are ministerial ; and we are 
not to imagine that the sacred writers deceive us because they 
do not give us the precise words of Him whose meaning they 
desire to express. Otherwise we shall be like mere miserable 
catchers at syllables, who imagine that the truth is tied to the 
points of letters ; whereas, not in words only, but in all other 
symbols of the mind, it is the mind itself which is to be 
sought for." — Augustine. 

" Devotion to the letter is the counterfeit of true and im- 
plicit devotion to the sacred text." — Canon Westcott. 

" Unto a Christian man there can be nothing more neces- 
sary or profitable than the knowledge of Holy Scripture, 
forasmuch as in it is contained God's true word, setting forth 
His glory, and also man's duty." — " Book of Homilies." (See 
also the sixth of the thirty-nine articles.) 

" There is nothing in the Vedas, nothing in the Avesta, 
nothing in the sacred books of Egypt, or the philosophy of 
Greece and Rome, which so unites the grandeur of omnipo- 
tence with the tenderness of a father toward his child (as the 
Hebrew Psalms). 

" These Psalms express the highest and best moments of 
Jewish life, and rise in certain points to the level of Chris- 
tianity. They do not contain the Christian spirit of forgive- 
ness, nor that of love to one's enemy. They are still narrowed 
to the range of the Jewish land and nation, and do not em- 
brace humanity. They are mountain summits of faith, rising 
into the pure air and light of day from hidden depths, and 
appearing as islands in the ocean. They reach, here and 
there, the level of the vast continent, though not broad 



84 



enough themselves to become the home of all races and na- 
tions." — James Freeman Clarke. 

" That the prophets and apostles taught under the influ- 
ence of the Holy Spirit, was the universal belief of the ancient 
church, founded on the testimony of Scripture itself. (See 
II. Tim. iii. 16, II. Pet. i. 19-21.) But this living idea of 
inspiration was by no means confined to the written letter. 
. . . All, however, insisted on the practical importance 
of Scripture, its richness of Divine wisdom clothed in una- 
dorned simplicity, and its fitness to promote the edification of 
believers." — Hagenbach, " History of Doctrines." 

" Few heresies have done more to mislead than the state- 
ment made by the assembly of divines at Westminster, that 
the Word of God which is contained in the Scriptures of the 
Old and New Testaments is the only rule to direct us how we 
may glorify and enjoy Him." — Gail Hamilton in the Chris- 
tian Union. 

'•' A book let down out of the skies, immaculate, infallible, 
oracular — this is the traditional view of the Bible. 

" In the name of religion let it die ! 

" Then there will be a resurrection, and the Bible will live 
again, clothed in a higher form for our most rational rev- 
erence. All that ever made the Bible a Sacred Book lives on 
to-day, and will live on while these books exist. Holy men 
of old spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. They 
were most truly inspired. The Biblical writers recorded a real 
revelation. These books hold for us the works of God. The 
Word of God speaks to us in the person of Jesus Christ." — 
R. Heber Newton. 



85 



" With reference to things in the Bible, the question 
whether they are genuine or spurious is odd enough. What 
is genuine but that which is truly excellent, which stands in 
harmony with the purest nature and reason, and which even 
now ministers to our highest development ? What is spurious 
but the absurd and the hollow, which brings no fruit — at 
least, no good fruit ? " — Goethe. 

" The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We 
know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what 
they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken 
what they do not wish to hear, ' How do you know it is 
truth, and not an error of your own ? ' We know truth when 
we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that 
we are awake. 

" We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its mani- 
festation of its own nature by the term Revelation. These 
are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this 
communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. 
It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges 
of the sea of life. 

"Revelation is the disclosure of the soul." — Emerson, 
" The Over-Soul." 

" The Gospel doth not so much consist in verbis as in vir- 
tute." — Rev. John Smith. 

" In the first Gospel we have narrative ; in the second, 
memoirs ; in the third, history ; in the fourth, dramatic por- 
traiture." — Bishop Ellicott. 



86 



THE BIBLE. 

The importance of right views of the Bible 
can hardly be overstated when we remember 
the part that Book has played in the history not 
only of religious beliefs but of Christian civili- 
zation. A careful discussion of any one of the 
Sacred Writings that compose it would be im- 
possible in this brief chapter; we must rather 
limit ourselves here to a general statement of 
the Bible's worth, and of the reasons for the 
pre-eminence it holds and must ever hold in 
literature. 

Every great Religion has produced its Bible 
or collection of Sacred Books, most of which 
are now to be found in our libraries, printed in 
English. If we want to know whence the 
Chinese religionists draw their inspiration, we 
must turn to the Sacred Books edited by Con- 
fucius in the sixth century before Christ and to 
those compiled after his death by his disciples. 
If we would find the source of the religious in- 

87 



88 Heart of the Creeds. 

spiration of the people of India we must open 
the Vedic writings, the Sacred Books of Brah- 
manism,the oldest of them dating back perhaps 
two thousand or more years before Christ ; or 
to the Buddhist Scriptures, with their threefold 
division, compiled in the sixth century B.C., 
just after the Buddha's death. If we are study- 
ing the history of Persia, we shall be charmed 
with many a passage in the Avestas, the litur- 
gical books of the Zoroastrian Religion. If we 
desire light on the complicated religion of the 
most deeply religious nation of antiquity, the 
Egyptian, we shall have to turn to the five 
classes of Egyptian Sacred Books, composed 
several thousands of years before Christ. The 
Greeks had their Orphic writings, the Teutonic 
and Scandinavian Religion had its Eddas, the 
Mohammedans have their Koran, and the Jews, 
belonging to the Semitic race, had, and wher- 
ever they are found still have, their Sacred 
Books, which, grouped together, we call the 
Old Testament. 

In our English Bible there are thirty-nine of 
these Hebrew books, but in the Hebrew com- 
pilations certain books were united so that 
there were but twenty-two or twenty-four, and 



The Bible, 89 

these the Jews divided into three classes, which 
they called the Law, the Prophets, and the 
Sacred Writings, or the Psalms. 

These three classes of Sacred Books differ 
widely in the purpose of their composition, as 
well as in authorship and date, and while some 
of them bear unmistakable traces of the times 
when they originated, the history of others is 
not yet sufficiently determined to enable us to 
say with certainty when they received their 
final shape. In modern days these writings 
have been viewed entirely without perspective — 
history, prophecy, and poetry alike. Any state- 
ment from the Bible has been treated just like 
any other, people forgetting to ask when and 
how the idea embodied in the statement arose, 
or by what peculiar circumstances it was colored. 

In reality, these Sacred Books comprised the 
national literature of the Hebrews, some of 
them embodying their history, or supposed his- 
tory, some the best thoughts of their poets, and 
some expressing the lofty moral sense and ele- 
vated spiritual conceptions of that unique body 
of men, their Prophets. Nor are the books 
that have reached us the only ones the Hebrews 
had. In certain portions of the Old Testament 



90 Heart of the Creeds. 

there are incidental references to such books as 
the Book of the Wars of the Lord, the Book of 
Jashar, and the Annals of the Kings of Israel 
and Judah, all lost before our Saviour's time, 
yet all, no doubt, of equal interest historically, 
poetically, or spiritually, with those preserved. 
The writing of this mixed collection of He- 
brew books covers a period of somewhere about 
sixteen hundred years, the earliest of them, ac- 
cording to tradition, tracing to the time of 
Moses, the latest to the time when Nehemiah 
was governor of Judea in 420 B.C., and in them 
we find reflected all the different phases of 
Israel's life and culture and the vicissitudes and 
changes that successive generations had to re- 
cord. The early traditions of their origin, such 
as every nation of antiquity had, are here to be 
discovered. Their descent from Abraham is 
recorded, their slavery in Egypt, the beginning 
of their national life under Moses, their settle- 
ment in Palestine, their history as a republic, 
their history as a monarchy, their conquest by 
a foreign power, and the subsequent restoration 
to them of independence. Besides this, we have 
here the lofty moral utterances of their prophets, 
a body of men who, in successive generations, 



The Bible. 91 

appeared as reformers of the popular religion, 
which too often degenerated into a system of 
merely external observances; and we have a 
large collection of lyrical psalms, whose best 
parts are so catholic that, although composed 
"long before the foundation of Rome and 
before the time of Homer," they are still in use 
in Christian worship all over the world, and are 
" in every age a fresh spring of hope." 

Extending over so long a period, we should 
naturally expect to find reflected in these writ- 
ings a great variety of religious views and states 
of mind. The Hebrews, even with their marked 
genius for religion, a genius similar to that dis- 
played by the Greeks for art and by the Romans 
for administration, never long remained station- 
ary in matters of religion. From age to age 
their religious conceptions changed, even as 
their ritual took color successively from the ob- 
servances of the national religions of Egypt and 
Assyria. And in the same age, widely con- 
trasting views and differences, as between the 
spiritual theology of the prophets and the 
grossly material theology of the priests, are 
often to be found. 

The theory of the Bible that has prevailed 



92 Heart of the Creeds, 

among us has not left room, even in the Old 
Testament, for differences of religious opinion, 
much less for inaccuracies or mistakes in histori- 
cal or other matters. But the Old Testament 
makes no such claim of infallibility for itself. 
It simply claims to be the national literature of 
a people, with the very texture of whose organ- 
ized life a deep religious sense is interwoven. 
It records their changing and sometimes con- 
tradictory views concerning God and man. It 
gives expression to a thousand lofty sentiments 
that the Divine Spirit has enkindled within 
them. It voices the universal hope and aspira- 
tion of religious souls, and puts words of peni- 
tence and trust into the lips of the sinning and 
sorrowing. 

" Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old ; 
The litanies of nations came, 
Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 
Up from the burning core below, — 
The canticles of love and woe." 

Of the whole Bible Dr. Mulford says : " It em- 
braces the most varied forms of literature ; as 
genealogies, laws, histories, records of legislative 
and judicial procedure, methods of sanitary,civil, 
and military administration. There is legend 



The Bible. 93 

and myth ; there are various forms of poetry : 
the ode, as in the antiphone of Moses and 
Miriam; the drama, as in the Book of Job ; the 
idyl, as in the Song of Solomon ; the lyric, as in 
the Book of Psalms and the opening pages of 
the Gospel of St. Luke ; and in the writings of 
St. Paul citations from the Greek comedy, as 
from Menander. 

" There are traces in these writings of the 
races, countries, and ages in which they ap- 
peared, and of climatic conditions, with respect 
to languages and customs and laws. There is 
a popular element, as in the stories of Samson 
and Ruth ; and there is also a priestly and a 
kingly element, as in the books of the Chron- 
icles and Kings. In some books there are 
traces of reflective phases of thought, as in the 
Book of Ecclesiastes ; and in some there are 
traces of Asiatic forms and Asiatic institu- 
tions." 

In short, the Old Testament writings must 
be studied with the same care as other books, 
and the laws of literary and historic criticism 
must be applied to them as searchingly as to 
the literatures of other ancient peoples. Alle- 
gory and legend must be carefully distinguished 



94 Heart of the Creeds. 

from straightforward narration ; prophetical 
rhapsody and fervid poetry must not be forced 
to yield what is technically known as doctrine. 
And above all the meaning of inspiration must 
be clearly defined. 

When we come to the New Testament writ- 
ings, of which there are, in all, thirty-seven, we 
find that the conditions under which they have 
been produced are somewhat different from 
those under which the various books of the 
Old Testament have come to be. They were 
produced in Palestine amid the new religious 
enthusiasm enkindled by the life and teachings 
of the Messiah, whose advent indeed made the 
dawning of a new day for men. 

As Sakya Muni (the Buddha) arose in India, 
in the seventh century before Christ, to reform 
the popular religion, so Jesus came in Palestine 
to reform not only the Hebrew, but all religious 
faiths. Foretold by the prophets, who, what- 
ever we may think of their other predictions, 
certainly foresaw the Messianic times and the 
more spiritual religion that the Christ should 
bring, at last the Sun of Righteousness arose 
" with healing in his wings," the Word became 
flesh and dwelt among men } full of grace and 



The Bible. 95 

truth, and they beheld his glory, and were in- 
spired with love for the life in God and for him 
who taught the simple way of life. Out of this 
inspiration were born the Gospels and St. Paul's 
Epistles, and the few remaining books that 
compose the New Testament. 1 There are inter- 
esting questions connected with the writing of 
each of them ; date and authorship are not 
in every case fully known, nor can we tell the 
changes that have come upon them in course 
of transcription. But such matters are not 
vital. We know from the New Testament that 
Jesus lived, and that he preached faith in God 
and man, and taught that self-renunciation, 
striving after the ideal, is the true way of life, 
and that at last he died for his principles, and so 
dying, gave his life for the world ; all else in the 
records being incidental, and of comparatively 
little importance to faith. 

1 The twenty-seven books which compose the New Testa- 
ment are not all the Sacred Writings known to the early 
Church. The Gospel of Nicodemus, the Epistles of Barnabas 
and Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas were read in many 
churches and held in equal reverence with the books com- 
prised in our Canon ; while for a long time the right of the 
2d and 3d Epistles of St. John, the Epistles of St. James, St. 
Jude, and the 2d of St. Peter, and the Book of Revelation to 
be regarded as Scripture was greatly disputed. 



96 Heart of the Creeds. 

As in the case of the Old Testament writings, 
the true significance of these Epistles and Gos- 
pels was not at first obscured by superstitious 
reverence of any sort. But, as happened in 
later ages with the Hebrew writings, and as in- 
deed has happened with the Bibles of all faiths, 
there came a time in the history of Christianity 
when what was written, as most books are writ- 
ten, with simple integrity and true purpose, and 
with common desire to impart to others truth 
that men had received, came to be regarded as 
given supernaturally by God. Inspiration is a 
figurative term, which means divine inbreathing, 
or movement of the spiritual forces of the soul, 
but in later Christian times, and especially since 
the Reformation, inspiration has commonly and 
most unreasonably meant the dictation by God 
to men of not only the sentiments but the 
words of Scripture. There are many of us to 
whom in early life that view of the Bible was 
taught, and to whom, at one time, it seemed 
sacrilegious to express a doubt of the literal 
truth of even the stories of Samson or Jonah, 
or the standing still of the sun and moon at 
Joshua's command, or the speaking of Balaam's 
ass. And that feeling arose from the belief we 



The Bible. 97 

had that the Almighty, who never makes mis- 
takes, had chosen certain men as His amanu- 
enses, and had bidden them write all that we 
found between the covers of the Bible. The 
view was superstitious and, in the last analysis, 
destructive of true reverence for the Bible. The 
Bible with its history, poetry, prophecy, homi- 
ly, apocalypse, legend, and myth, is a varied 
record of God's ever progressing, ever widening 
revelation of truth to men. It shows God not 
speaking supernaturally out of heaven to men's 
ears, but speaking naturally, age after age, 
through their hearts and consciences. It shows 
the gradual advance of spiritual knowledge and 
the preparation of at least one part of the world 
for the Christ, and best of all, it brings us face 
to face with Jesus himself and his divine work. 
Let us confess frankly that we find in the 
Bible mistaken opinions, inconsistencies, con- 
tradictory statements, and inaccuracies of 
various sorts. But that does not disturb our 
enjoyment of the Bible, either in a literary 
sense, as our noblest English classic, or in a 
spiritual, as the tenderest and most sacred rec- 
ord of religious thought and experience in the 
world. We know that some of the Psalms con- 



98 Heart of the Creeds. 

tain false and cruel sentiments common in the 
times when they were written, but that fact 
does not prevent our valuing the truly spiritual 
parts of the Hebrew Psalter; that the mind 
and words of Jesus were not fully apprehended 
by his earliest disciples, yet surely such knowl- 
edge does not forbid our basking in the sun- 
shine of the Saviour's life and teachings which 
they record. 

The Bible was written much as other books 
are written : the historical narratives compiled 
from all available sources of information, and 
sometimes perpetuating as history what was 
clearly mythical or legendary ; the poetical 
parts shaping themselves in the fervid imagina- 
tions of poets ; the prophetical having their 
origin in an unusually high degree of spiritual 
illumination. 

Its value consists, first, in its appeal to the 
ethical and spiritual side of man's nature, the 
divine in him ; and, second, to what is often al- 
most entirely overlooked, its literary greatness. 

It is related that Sir Walter Scott, in his last 
illness, when asked what book he would like to 
have read to him, said : " There is no book but 
the Bible," and we can all understand what he 



The Bible, 99 

meant by such words. There .s no book like 
the Bible to quicken the conscience and arouse 
faith in God. There is no book that can so 
satisfy man's spiritual hunger, and in life's 
darkest hours so bring peace. There is no 
book that so shames the sordid and sensual 
spirit of the world, and whose utterances are 
so pronounced against oppression and wrong. 
The Bible is not a storehouse of proof-texts 
with which to build systems of theology, but 
rather the witness to God's life in nature, in 
history, and in man. It contains the truth of 
God ; its record is part of the great revelation 
that is in progress in the world by means of 
literature, art, government, scientific discovery, 
and the various movements of individual and 
social life. 

People sometimes say: "If I must read the 
Bible just as I read other books, separating be- 
tween true and false, in its narrative and other 
parts, how am I ever to be sure that I have the 
truth ? " The answer to that is : the Bible was 
given to teach the old truths that save the soul 
— that is, that make men brave and manly, de- 
vout and tender, honest and pure ; given to 
help us keep in mind that we are all children of 



ioo Heart of the Creeds. 

God, and that sin against Him and His divine 
laws means sin against our own natures ; that 
the Bible teaches no truth as necessary to salva- 
tion but the old truths that in every age have 
found response in the hearts and consciences of 
wise and reverent men. 

If we are ever in doubt about the truth of 
the moral or religious sentiments expressed in 
any part of the Bible, we may safely test them 
by the highest standards we know, especially 
the standard of Christ's perfect life and teach- 
ings. If they agree with that they are right, if 
not they are wrong. Lord Falkland wisely 
says: " To those that follow their reason in 
the interpretation of the Scriptures, God will 
either give His grace for assistance to find the 
truth, or His pardon if they miss it." 

The literary value of the Bible has been but 
little regarded in places where people cared 
about the Book principally for the proof texts 
it yielded for their favorite dogmas. But the 
Bible is a collection of venerable and noble 
writings, that together make a book without a 
parallel in the world. It is a varied literature, 
containing lofty imagination, eloquence and 
poetry unsurpassed, wonderfully-written narra- 



The Bible. 101 

tive, delightful biography, interesting tradition 
and legend, profound spiritual utterances, and 
fresh, clear, crisp suggestions for practical life. 
There have been few, if any, great literary 
men who have not been lovers of the Bible, 
whether they cared for the popular theology 
that was forced from its pages or not. Emer- 
son, whose great mission was to show that rev- 
elation is not confined to a book, but is broad 
and deep as human history and human life, nay, 
universal as creation itself, says, among other 
noble things, of the Bible: "The most original 
book in the world is the Bible. This old col- 
lection of the ejaculations of love and dread, of 
the supreme desires and contritions of men, 
proceeding out of the region of the grand and 
eternal, seems . . . the alphabet of the nations. 
. . . The elevation of this book may be meas- 
ured by observing how certainly all observa- 
tion of thought clothes itself in its words and 
forms of speech. . . . Whatever is majestically 
thought in a great moral element, instantly 
approaches this old Sanscrit. . . . Shakespeare, 
the first literary genius of the world, the highest 
in whom the moral is not the predominating 
element, leans on the Bible ; his poetry pre- 



102 Heart of the Creeds, 

supposes it. . . . People imagine that the place 
which the Bible holds in literature it owes to 
miracles. It owes it simply to the fact that it 
came out of a profouncler depth of thought 
than any other book." 

To the ordinary teaching of the Bible by re- 
ligious people and in the Churches, is distinctly 
due much of the neglect the Bible now suffers 
among us. It is the record of faith and so the 
inspirer of faith ; and it is our noblest classic, 
to be studied before Homer or Shakespeare, or 
any of the great authors of ancient or modern 
times. It should be read rationally. It should 
be read daily. Its sacred words should be com- 
mitted to memory in early life and treasured to 
old age. Its biographies should be studied, its 
poetry enjoyed, its righteous principles taken 
into the soul, and its uplifting, spiritual truths 
suffered to steal into our lives like the perfume 
of flowers, or soft strains of music at the even- 
tide. 



but the Church of the spirit. The words of faith which can- 
not be transposed are : ' I believe in the Holy Ghost ; in the 
holy Catholic Church.' " — Mulford, " Republic of God." 

"Our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in 
heaven and earth is named." — St. Paul. 

" The Gospel first placed these two great principles as the 
main pillars of the new moral structure : God the universal 
Father ; mankind one brotherhood ; God made known 
through the mediation of His Son, the image and humanized 
type and exemplar of His goodness ; mankind of one kin- 
dred, and therefore of equal rank in the sight of the 
Creator, and to be united in one spiritual commonwealth." — 
Dean Milman, " History of Christianity," vol. I., p. 204. 

"To you and me and men like ourselves is committed, in 
these anxious days, that which is at once an awful responsi- 
bility and a splendid destiny— to transform this modern world 
into a Christian society. ... to gather together the 
scattered forces of a divided Christendom into a confederation, 
in which organization will be of less account than fellowship 
with one spirit and faith in one Lord — into a communion 
wide as human life and deep as human need — into a Church 
which shall outshine even the golden glory of its dawn by the 
splendor of its eternal noon." — Edwin Hatch, M.A., 
Bampton Lectures, 1880. 

" I am truly thankful to hear that I have helped to make 
a Churchman of you. The longer I live the more I find the 
Church of England the most rational, liberal, practical form 
which Christianity has yet assumed. . . . Strange to 
say, Thomas Carlyle now says that the Church of England is 
the most rational thing he sees now going." — " Life of 
Charles Kingsley," vol. II., p. 136 (extract from a private 
letter). 

" The Church must welcome to its bosom all who are will- 
ing to be taught of Jesus, and to bear His cross ; all who have 
come to Him and acknowledged Him as the Master. " — Bishop 
Vail. 



105 



THE CHURCH. 



103 



" Every idea must have a visible unfolding ; a habitation 
is necessary to any principle ; a church is God between four 
walls ; every dogma must have a temple." — Victor Hugo. 

" In the very earliest period, the Christian society presents 
itself as a simple association of a common creed and common 
sentiments ; the first Christians united to enjoy together the 
same emotions and the same religious convictions. We find 
among them no system of determinate doctrines, no rules, no 
discipline, no body of magistrates. 

" At the end of the fourth and at the beginning of the fifth 
century, Christianity was no longer merely an individual 
belief ; it was an institution ; it was constituted. It was not 
only a religion, it was also a church." — Guizot's " History of 
Civilization." 

" The various grades of the Christian clergy have sprung up 
in Christian society in the same ways, and by the same divine, 
because the same natural, necessity as the various grades of 
government, law, and science." — Dean Stanley. 

" In its earliest usage, therefore, catholic means univer- 
sal as opposed to individual, particular. The Church through- 
out the world is called catholic, just as the resurrection of all 
mankind is called catholic. In its later sense, as a fixed at- 
tribute, it implies orthodoxy as opposed to heresy, conformity 
as opposed to dissent. Thus, to the primary idea of extension 
are superadded also the ideas of doctrine and unity. But 
this later sense grows out of the earlier. The truth was 
the same everywhere, quod semper, quod ubique, quod at 
omnibus. The heresies were partial, scattered, localized, 
isolated." — Bishop Lightfoot. 

' ' The life of the spirit has its witness to the world in the 
Church. 

" The Church has an organic unity and life. 

" The Church is the company of all faithful people. 

" The Church is the witness to the life of the spirit in 
humanity. It is not the source of the life of the spirit, but 
the witness of it. The spirit is not the gift of the Church, 



104 



THE CHURCH. 

Churches or societies for the promotion of 
religious life and thought have always existed 
in the world, and it is difficult to see how the 
growth of mankind in knowledge and culture 
has made them any less necessary to-day than 
they have ever been. Our conception of the 
function of religion may be different from that 
our fathers held. The Church may no longer 
regard it as her mission to try to frighten 
people into the kingdom of heaven with un- 
natural teachings concerning God and the life 
to come, but surely man needs as much as ever 
for the development of his spiritual faculties, 
the quickening of his conscience, the nurture of 
his true instincts and perceptions, the pure 
and gentle ministrations of the unseen spirit, 
who in all ages has influenced the soul through 
churches and sacraments and prayers, and whose 
perpetual mission it is to redeem the world 
from sordidness and sin by showing it the essen- 

107 



108 Heart of the Creeds. 

tial truth its life contains. The Church is the 
great witness to the truth within man as well 
as without, and all questions concerning it, 
historical or otherwise, must therefore be full of 
interest. 

There are two ways of thought regard- 
ing the origin of institutions or customs with 
which we are familiar, and which age or long 
use has made sacred. One of these ways is 
to imagine the institution or custom as hav- 
ing come full-fledged into existence in some 
remote time, under the sanction of some high 
authority ; the other to regard it as having 
been slowly evolved out of preexistent con- 
ditions or modes. The latter way of thought 
is that now universally followed in scientific 
investigation of all sorts, and by the most 
trustworthy students in every department of 
research. Just as we trace our own present 
judgments in matters of thought and practical 
life back to their crude beginnings in our child- 
ish conceptions of things about and things 
above us, so the modern student has learned 
that if he would understand them he must 
trace familiar institutions and rites back to 
their earliest beginnings. 



The Church. 109 

The introduction of this method into the 
sphere of religion has wrought great changes in 
modern theological conceptions, and through- 
out enlightened Protestantism has released 
men from slavery to irrational views concern- 
ing the visible Church and its symbols or sacra- 
ments. 

There are few subjects on which so much 
has been written as the proper organization of 
the Christian Church. Romanists have written 
in defence of the Papacy, English and Ameri- 
can Churchmen have written in defence of 
Episcopacy, Presbyterians, Independents, and 
Methodists have successively argued for their 
peculiar form of church order. And almost all, 
in turn, have claimed for themselves an exclu- 
sive divine right to exist. Among this medley 
of opinions, unfortunately, all claiming support 
from the same passages in the New Testament, 
and all appealing with equal confidence to 
apostolic usage, it is no wonder that many a 
man has given up trying to decide what seemed 
so perplexing a question, and at last has grown 
indifferent to all forms of organized Christi- 
anity. 

Indifference to the Church as an institution 



no Heart of the Creeds. 

is not, however, philosophical or right, any 
more than indifference to the state and its con- 
stitution, for, as there are important philosophi- 
cal principles involved in all existing theories 
of government, so there are in all theories of 
church order and administration. 

When a number of men are inspired with 
common sentiments, the first thing that sug- 
gests itself is the idea of organization. Com- 
munity of feeling quickly draws them together, 
and besides, united they will be better able to 
extend their principles among others. The 
christian Churches of the Apostolic age were 
formed in obedience to this law of organization, 
and there is no more reason to suppose that in 
the beginning God gave express commands con- 
cerning them, than that He gave express com- 
mands concerning the government of the em- 
pire into which Christianity was born. He is 
the inspirer of true religion and good order 
everywhere, and He loves " whatsoever is lovely 
and of good report." Thus we have the right 
to claim the most divine sanction for whatever 
Church organization, in the better judgment of 
mankind, seems to embody most faithfully the 
true principles of religion and order. Hooker, 



The Church, 1 1 1 

in his " Ecclesiastical Polity," says : " Church 
government is a thing which the Church itself 
constitutes under a Divine authorization to do 
so." " We must note that he that affirmeth 
speech to be necessary among all men through- 
out the world doth not thereby import that all 
men must necessarily speak one kind of lan- 
guage. Even so the necessity of polity and 
regimen in all churches may be held, without 
holding any one certain form to be necessary 
for them all." 

The theory of the church, however, that in 
the third century, under the influence of Cyp- 
rian, Bishop of Carthage, shaped itself for West- 
ern Christendom, regarded the episcopal order 
alone as having a right to exist, and sought to 
limit the working of God's grace to that, ap- 
pealing to Scripture no less than tradition for 
its authority. The Presbyterian and Indepen- 
dent Churches of the sixteenth century, disput- 
ing the exclusive claims of the mediaeval cath- 
olic church, in the same spirit, likewise appealed 
to Scripture, and so there have come down to 
our time, besides the Roman Catholic, two dis- 
tinct and indeed mutually exclusive theories of 
the church, each building itself on Scripture, 



112 Heart of the Creeds. 

and seeking to prove itself the true Apostolic 
Church. These two views are thus described 
by Bishop Kip in his " Double Witness of the 
Church " : " We contend, then, that in accord- 
ance with the directions given by our Lord, 
His Apostles, acting under the direct influence 
of the Holy Spirit, established a Church having 
a ministry of three orders, and which has been 
continued by their successors down to the pres- 
ent time. These three orders were: 1st, the 
Apostles, called in the following age the Bish- 
ops ; 2d, the Presbyters or Elders ; and 3d, the 
Deacons. 

" We contend, also, that there is no instance 
of ordination recorded in Scripture, as being per- 
formed by any except the Apostles, or others, 
as Timothy, or Titus, who had been invested 
by them with the authority of Bishops ; in 
other words, that there is no instance anywhere 
of mere Presbyters ordaining. And we believe 
that this remained an established rule of the 
Church, never violated for more than 1500 
years, until at the Reformation in the sixteenth 
century, when some bodies of Christians, who 
had separated from the Church, proceeded to 
ordain ministers by the hands of mere priests 



The Church. 113 

or Presbyters. We therefore require in those 
who officiate at our altars that they should be 
Episcopally ordained — that is, that they should 
be ordained by some Bishop, who has derived 
his authority from those Bishops who went be- 
fore him in the Church in uninterrupted succes- 
sion since the Apostles' days. This is the doc- 
trine of the Apostolical succession. On the 
other hand, those who deny the necessity of 
Episcopal government, assert that the Apostles 
of the Early Church left no successors — that is, 
that it is not necessary for ordination to be per- 
formed by a Bishop — that there is but one or- 
der of ministers in the Church, that of Presby- 
ters — and that these have a right, by their own 
authority, to ordain and admit to the ministry. 
Such, then, is the dividing line between us, and 
to decide which view is right and most in ac- 
cordance with the government of the Primitive 
Church, we must refer to intimations given in 
Scripture, and the testimony of History in the 
earliest ages of our faith." 

From this point Bishop Kip, to support his 
view of the sole divine authority of an episcopal 
organization of the church, goes on to build, by 
analogy, an argument from the Jewish Church 



i 'i 4 Heart of the Creeds. 

and its complicated organization, from certain 
incidental passages in the New Testament, and 
from early Christian history. 

His argument is elaborated with great care, 
but one feels, as he follows it, that it is hardly 
more binding on reason than the equally in- 
genious argument for the sole authority of the 
papal organization, since it takes almost as 
much for granted. The chief assumption which 
underlies all claims, whether of Episcopalians, 
Presbyterians, or Independents, for the sole di- 
vine right of a particular form of church order, 
is that Jesus intended to establish such an or- 
der to the exclusion of any other. But it seems 
strange that any one can read the simple story 
of his life and teachings, and not feel how sig- 
nificant is his silence with regard to the exter- 
nals of religion ; can find any thing like hier- 
archical pretensions or aims in those earnest 
missionary teachers — his first disciples. When 
Jesus was asked about the external signs of his 
kingdom, he invariably tried to show men that 
his kingdom meant the advance of spirituality 
and faith. When his earliest disciples formed 
new Christian congregations, they seemed desir- 
ous of giving them the simplest and fewest laws 



The Church. 115 

necessary for their corporate existence ; when 
St. Paul spoke sorrowfully about schism, he did 
it not as the advocate of a theory of the church 
such as Cyprian and Augustine long afterward 
held — a theory which limited God's kingdom 
to a certain external order, and made it a fear- 
ful sin to violate that, — but rather as a Christian 
minister, who saw a community wickedly quar- 
relling over the most peaceable and sacred truths 
of religion, and instead of living as brethren in 
one household of faith, setting up rival house- 
holds, and so practically denying the most vital 
principles of the Gospel. 

We have no evidence that Jesus or the 
Apostles held or sought to promulgate any ex- 
clusive theory of church order or legislation. 
All over Judea congregations of Jews existed, 
each with its separate corps of elders, part of 
whom were appointed to conduct its worship, 
part to manage its affairs, and whenever one of 
these synagogue congregations became con- 
vinced that Jesus was the Messiah it seems to 
have taken on a Christian form, without, in 
any essential particular, changing its constitu- 
tion. The Apostles or persons appointed by 
them naturally assumed the general oversight 



1 1 6 Heart of the Creeds. 

of these new congregations and their elder- 
ships, especially where they were formed in 
non-Jewish communities, and thus, so far as can 
be ascertained, for in the New Testament there 
is a marked absence of direct statement con- 
cerning it, the polity of the early church grew 
up, — a polity that would seem to have been for 
the most part accidental rather than delib- 
erately planned, and to have combined some of 
the features of both Presbyterianism and Inde- 
pendency, but to have contained, at least in 
germ, the moderate Episcopacy of a later time. 
We have little accurate knowledge of the 
growth of the episcopal order during the first 
three centuries. Certain passages from a letter 
called the Epistle to the Corinthians, written by 
Clement of Rome, a fellow-laborer of St. Paul, 
in the second century, and from the letters of 
Ignatius, who was martyred about the year 
115, and from the writings of Irenaeus, who 
died at the beginning of the third century, are 
confidently appealed to by those who desire to 
trace the episcopal order of the church to 
Jesus and the Apostles. On the other hand, 
those who believe in episcopacy as a growth or 
development, think that the supremacy of the 



The Church. 117 

bishop, which is clearly enough to be seen in 
the Latin Church in the third century, the time 
of Tertullian and Cyprian, had its origin in 
simple respect for seniority, and the preemi- 
nence naturally accorded chief presbyters or 
elders in the more important churches. On 
this disputed point, Dean Milman, in his " His- 
tory of Christianity " (vol. I., p. 19), has spoken 
wisely and fairly, and as he has left the ques- 
tion, so we think all fair-minded people should 
leave it. " The whole of Christendom," he 
says, " when it emerges out of the obscurity of 
the first century, appears uniformly governed 
by certain superiors of each community called 
i bishops,' but the origin and extent of this 
superiority, and the manner in which the 
Bishop assumed a distinct authority from the 
inferior presbyters, is one of those difficult 
questions of Christian history, which, since the 
Reformation, has been more and more dark- 
ened by those fatal enemies to candid and dis- 
passionate enquiry, prejudice and interest." 

And again (vol. II., p. 30) : " The manner and 
the period of the separation of a distinct class, 
a hierarchy, from the general body of the com- 
munity, and the progress of the great division 



1 1 8 Heart of the Creeds, 

between the clergy and the laity, are equally 
obscure with the primitive constitution of the 
church. Like the Judaism of the provinces, 
Christianity (at first) had no sacerdotal order." 

Tradition assigns the establishment of epis- 
copacy, at least in Asia Minor, to St. John, and 
the Latin father Jerome, as quoted by Hooker 
(" Ecclesiastical Polity," vol. III., book 7, p. 
130), says: "Till through instinct of the devil, 
there grew in the Church factions, and among 
the people it began to be professed, I am of 
Paul, I of Apollos, I of Cephas, churches were 
governed by the common voice of presbyters ; 
but when every one began to reckon those 
whom he had baptized, his own, and not Christ's, 
it was decreed in the whole world that one 
chosen out of the presbyters should be placed 
above the rest, to whom all the care of the 
Church should belong, and so all seeds of schism 
be removed." It is not improbable that in 
some quarters episcopacy may thus have origi- 
nated, and that St. John, as tradition says, may 
have had much to do with the appointment of 
successors to the Apostles. 

But it is clearly impossible to establish the 
extreme view of Cyprian or Augustine, that 



The Church. 1 1 9 

there is " no Church without a bishop " ; and, 
at least, the difficulties of New Testament inter- 
pretation, and the uncertainties of early church 
history, are far too great to warrant us in tell- 
ing an inquirer that if he will read for himself 
he will find the proofs. 

What reasons, then, have Episcopalians for 
their adherence to the Episcopal Church, and 
on what grounds can they ask people bred 
under other systems to give it their allegiance ? 
No Episcopalian can properly tell people that 
his is the only Church, for we have no suffi- 
cient grounds for the belief that either Jesus 
or his Apostles contemplated a particular 
form of church organization, never to be 
abrogated nor changed. Much of the best 
Christian life for centuries has not been included 
in the Churches that hold to the Catholic order 
— that is, that acknowledge bishops ; and the 
church's only apology for being is the mission 
she has to make men realize their sonship of 
God. 

The Episcopal ox Anglican Church is one of 
the great Churches of Christendom, her history 
tracing back to the earliest period of the estab- 
lishment of Christianity in Britain, her consti- 



1 20 Heart of the Creeds. 

tution essentially the same as that of the Greek 
and Roman Churches. But Christianity would 
have a very hopeless outlook if we were obliged 
to limit it to either the Greek, the Roman, or 
the English Church, or to all of them combined, 
for in both East and West a large part of the 
Christian population belongs to other churches 
than these, many of which have no idea of 
adopting the episcopal order. 

In the United States a large proportion of 
the clergy of the Episcopal Church have been 
bred wholly, or in part, in other communions, 
and to her laity there are accessions continually, 
from the surrounding churches. It was recently 
stated that, in the last twenty years, the number 
of communicants in the Episcopal Church in 
the United States had grown from 161,224 to 
398,098, and the number of dioceses and juris- 
dictions from 34 to 65, and much of this growth, 
at least in the number of communicants, has 
been in the older States, and in places where 
Calvinism once prevailed. But it is clearly not 
true that changes from Calvinism, or Unitarian- 
ism, are commonly the result of a conviction 
that the Episcopal Church is the only true 
church. There are other sufficient reasons for 



The Church. 121 

such changes without supposing the adoption 
of so groundless a theory as this. The Episco- 
pal Church has advantages which some others 
do not possess ; she has a history that goes 
back continuously to the establishment of reli- 
gion in Britain in the second century. She has 
a liturgy that, in the so-called Protestant world, 
for dignity and spirituality, has no parallel. 
She is catholic, not only, according to the ear- 
liest usage of that word, in that she recognizes 
herself as part of the great Christian family, 
and feels in herself the thrills of all true life, 
but also in the later meaning of the word, where- 
by it stood for that part of the Christian world 
which recognized the episcopal order, and to 
whose keeping, through the Middle Ages, were 
entrusted the rich treasures of tradition that 
have come down to us. She has a doctrine of 
apostolic succession which keeps her from de- 
generating into mere voluntaryism. But this 
doctrine of apostolic succession does not mean 
that, in some magical way, special grace is con- 
veyed by the touch of a bishop's hands, but 
rather that the Church recognizes herself as a 
continuous body, whose threefold order has 
never been broken as far back as church history 



122 Heart of the Creeds. 

can be traced. 1 An Independent Church can 
make itself at any time, without reference to 
what has gone before. The Episcopal Church 
has a permanent external order and authority, 
which she transmits from age to age. Thus she 
is able to bring into modern civilization, with its 
unsettled conditions, its comparative newness 
and crudeness, an element of stability and per- 
manence that such a civilization greatly needs. 
A pastor of one of the leading Unitarian 
Churches of the Eastern States said lately, on 



1 We are perfectly familiar with the disputes regarding the 
age of the Episcopal Church — whether she may properly 
claim to be the English Church of the Middle Ages reformed, 
or whether her origin is to be sought in Reformation times. 
Can any church perpetuating the main principle of organiza- 
tion, the chief traditions belonging to historic Christianity, 
never having broken with these, be ranked, in point of age, 
with the churches that newly arose during the Reformation ? 

It may be further alleged that a few hundred years, more 
or less, does not increase the value of such an organization. 
But there are few in cultured communities who are insensible 
to the claims of antiquity, or the notes of catholicity. 

That the Episcopal Church, as she now is, is not free from 
serious limitations, is, however, apparent to all who desire for 
Christianity the largest and most rational expression ; and 
there are many within her fold who, while strongly attached 
to her, yet look to see her and other churches merged into a 
great American Catholic Church. It would, however, seem 
that this Church of the future must in some form perpetuate 
the main features of historic Christianity. 



The Church. 123 

his return from a trip through some of the 
newer parts of the West, that he had never felt 
so strongly the value of the Episcopal Church 
as when he had found it, with its orderly and 
beautiful service, in rude and rough places on 
the frontier. It was, he said, the only bit of 
refined civilization they had. This is not true 
of other parts of the country, yet there can 
be little doubt that it is from a conviction that 
she, of all churches, is best equipped for the 
work of advancing a higher type of Christian 
civilization, that so many men turn from other 
churches to her doors. 

A few years ago, when the Calvinistic 
churches were more hide-bound than now, 
people used to look with wonder on the differ- 
ences of opinion that existed within the Episco- 
pal Church, and some gave her, a little in deri- 
sion, the epithet of the " Roomy Church." But, 
of late, the sneer has died away, and there are 
few who do not now feel that her breadth 
is one thing that shows her fitness to be the 
spiritual home of the human brotherhood. 
She is not a school of philosophy, but the 
nursery of the instincts of worship, and of pure 
and earnest life. 



1 24 Heart of the Creeds. 

Her terms of admission are not found in 
articles of faith, but rather in the recognition of 
the native obligations of the soul to truth and 
virtue. She gathers the tempted to her altars 
and gives them strength, the doubting and 
gives them faith, the sorrowing and gives them 
consolation, and none are too weak, too doubt- 
ing, or too sad to find a welcome in her fold. 
So in the future as in the past it would seem 
that her progress must keep pace with the 
growth of thought and culture. 

To sum up what we have said: churches 
were first established in obedience to the in- 
stinct that bids men of like sentiments unite. 
They were established for the promotion of 
the moral and spiritual — that is, the whole wel- 
fare of mankind. They were meant to help 
men realize the divine sonhood, the universal 
brotherhood, and amid the fleeting conditions 
of this human life to give the soul a firmer 
grasp on that which never changes. The laws of 
their polity were the divine principles that are 
given for the establishment of good govern- 
ment everywhere, the principles of catholicity 
and permanence. These conditions the Episco- 
pal Church, in her constitution, fully realizes, 



The Church. 125 

and it is the continual aim of all large-minded 
men within her fold to keep her true to her 
divine mission — to teach men morality and 
faith, and to unite them in a large and rational 
way for the promotion of the truths that save 
society and lift mankind nearer to God. 

In opposition to the sectarian principle that 
men have a right to make churches on the basis 
of individual opinions, she declares that no 
church can properly be made except on the 
basis of fundamental moral and spiritual truth, 
and that in such a church many individual 
opinions must necessarily exist. 

In the modern Christian world she stands for 
unity and permanence. 

Into her thought of unity come past, present, 
and future. Her fellowship is with true souls 
of all times : 

" The saints above and those below 
But one communion make." 

Her permanence is the witness to the un- 
changing life of God, and the eternal supremacy 
in the universe of His kingdom of law and 
love. 



THE SACRAMENTS. 



127 



" Earth 's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God ; 
But only he who sees takes off his shoes." 

— Mrs. Browning. 

" The sacraments become the evidence of the common life of 
humanity. They take up the types of nature in its own life. 
This water is the symbol of purity ; this bread and wine are 
the symbols of the strength and joy of man. They are the 
common elements of life. They are the witness of the pres- 
ence of Him in the life of humanity, in whom the worship of 
the visible is overcome and destroyed. This baptism is given 
to children of every tribe and race ; as the sign of their com- 
mon relation with Him, who hath broken down the wall of 
partition, to make in Himself of twain one new man." — 
Mulford, " Republic of God." 

" Observe, then, baptism does not create a child of God. It 
authoritatively declares him. It does not make the fact ; it 
only reveals it. If baptism made it a fact, then and there for 
the first time baptism would be magic. Nay, faith does not 
create a child of God any more than baptism, nor does it 
make a fact. It only appropriates that which is a fact already. 

" The Catechism, however, says : ' In baptism I was made 
a child of God. ' Yes ; coronation makes a sovereign ; but, 
paradoxical as it may seem, it can only make a sovereign one 
who is a sovereign already. Crown a pretender, that corona- 
tion will not create the king. 



128 



"This doctrine protests against the notion of our being 
separate units in the Divine life. The church of Calvinism 
is merely a collection of atoms, — a sand-heap piled together, 
with no cohesion among themselves ; or a mass of steel filings 
cleaving separately to a magnet, but not to each other. Bap- 
tism proclaims a church — humanity joined in Christ to God. 

" The things of earth are pledges of things in heaven. It 
is not for nothing that God has selected for His sacrament 
the commonest of all acts — a meal, — and the most abundant 
of all materials — water. Think you that He means to say 
that only through two channels His Spirit streams into the 
soul ? Or is it not much more in unison with His dealings to 
say that these two are set apart to signify to us the sacra- 
mental character of all nature ? " — Rev. F. W. Robertson. 

" In the early Church, the careful distinction which later 
times have made between Baptism, Regeneration, Conversion, 
and Repentance did not exist. They all meant the same 
thing. 

"As in other parts of the Bible the hand, the heart, the 
face of God are used for God Himself, so the body, the 
flesh of Christ, are used for Christ Himself, for His whole 
personality and character." — Dean Stanley, " Christian 
Institutions." 

" The real presence of Christ's body and blood is not to be 
sought for in the Sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the 
Sacrament. " — Hooker. 



129 



THE SACRAMENTS. 

Religion has always formed for its outward 
expression rites or symbols to serve as rallying 
points for faith and worship. Some simple ob- 
ject or act of common life has generally been 
pressed into this sacred use, and thus has been 
so charged with special significance, so freight- 
ed with new meaning, that in time its true 
origin, as a religious rite, has come to be for- 
gotten. 

Baptism and the Lord's Supper are the two 
symbolical and representative sacramental rites 
of the Christian Religion. 

They are the two simple acts of washing and 
eating exalted above life's other common 
acts for the purposes of organized Christianity ; 
and their history has been much the same as 
that of other representative religious rites not 
only of Christianity but of the older Religions. 
Beginning simply and naturally, in time they 
have come to be regarded with superstitious 

131 



132 Heart of the Creeds. 

reverence, and to be adored, not for the truth 
they were set apart to represent, but for them- 
selves. We are all perfectly familiar with the 
two opposite ways of regarding them that pre- 
vail among us. The Roman Catholic Church 
holds them as sacred mysteries to be rever- 
enced beyond all other religious acts, because 
of some supposed vital relation in which they 
stand to the soul of man, while the extreme 
wing of so-called rational or non-churchly 
Christianity regards them as archaic and out- 
worn rites, no more claiming the allegiance of 
people to-day than the grand and impressive 
ceremonial of the Egyptian Religion or the 
sacrificial rites of old-time Judaism. The truth 
about them, as usual, lies between these two 
extremes. There is nothing in the accounts of 
their early institution or in the nature of the 
case, to warrant us in giving them the rever- 
ence of the Roman Catholic, and there is much 
to make us value them far beyond those who 
treat them as the mere playthings of supersti- 
tion. Any rite or symbol that has been loved 
and venerated by large numbers of earnest peo- 
ple, and that has ministered to spirituality and 
peace, however opinions may differ as to its 



The Sacraments. 133 

permanent usefulness, demands respectful treat- 
ment from all. 

There are two questions to be considered in 
this chapter on the Christian Sacraments, their 
history, and their perpetual significance and 
value. 

BAPTISM. 

Baptism is the first of them, and it takes us 
far away from our present surroundings to the 
remote East, among peoples whose modes of 
thought and expression differ widely from our 
own, and whose habits of life, owing to climatic 
conditions wholly dissimilar to ours, are often 
such as we can hardly understand. 

In Oriental countries, owing to the dust and 
heat, both cleanliness and comfort demand 
very frequent bathing of the whole body ; and 
the out-door life and comparatively small 
amount of clothing worn make the bath a sim- 
pler matter than with us. We cannot there- 
fore be surprised when in all the great Reli- 
gions of the East we find the act of washing 
the body, either completely or in part, used to 
symbolize internal purification, or transforma- 
tion of character. 



134 Heart of the Creeds. 

There has been much fruitless discussion, 
among people who felt it necessary to perpet- 
uate the exact form of administration of Bap- 
tism known to the early converts of Christian- 
ity, concerning the use and prevalence of this 
rite among the Hebrews before Christ's time, 
but it is much more to the purpose to discover 
that the rite was connected with the religion 
not only of the Hebrews but of all other 
Eastern peoples ; that the Egyptians, Persians, 
and Hindoos, as well as the Hebrews, baptized 
those whom they wished to initiate into the 
full privileges of faith, or for whom they desired 
greater holiness of life. 

Thus, when John, the herald of the Messiah 
arose in the wilderness of Judea, no priest, but 
an intensely devout and earnest layman who, 
in common with many of the Jewish sect of 
the Essenes and with some of the older 
prophets, had retired to the wilderness to gain 
spiritual power by contemplation, prayer, and 
fasting, he naturally coupled with his preach- 
ing the simple, healthful act of bathing the 
body. 

The Essenes were even more scrupulous 
bathers than the Pharisees, for the sake of 



The Sacraments. 135 

their ablutions always choosing their solitary- 
abodes on the banks of rivers or in the vicinity 
of clear mountain springs. Indeed, ceremonial 
bathing took up a great part of their time, and 
so there is no reason why the baptism of John 
should have awakened more surprise among 
the people of Palestine than it did. The bath 
in water was so much a part of the outward 
religious life of the Hebrews that no one could 
think it strange or other than appropriate that 
when he found their hearts stirred by his 
preaching the prophet not only spoke ear- 
nestly to them about their lives, but gave them 
a bath in the river Jordan, whose soft, re- 
freshing waters flowed near by, so sending them 
back into the world freshly consecrated to God 
and His service. 

From this natural beginning grew the Chris- 
tian rite of Baptism, for although John's active 
mission was soon ended, the early Christian 
teachers, some of whom, as indeed Jesus him- 
self, had received baptism in the Jordan, con- 
tinued the practice of baptizing those who 
came under the deeper influences of the re- 
ligious life. 

At first the rite seems to have been limited 



136 Heart of the Creeds. 

to those who in adult life embraced the spirit- 
ual truths Jesus taught, but little by little, as 
in the older religions, it came to be performed 
on infants and little children, the ceremony in 
these cases differing somewhat from that used 
in the baptism of adults. It is impossible to 
trace the steps by which this change came 
about. The sources of church history in the 
first and second centuries are exceedingly 
meagre, and we have no means of knowing 
whether infants were baptized in Apostolic 
times or not. It is certain, however, that the 
practice of Infant Baptism was not universal, 
in some quarters perhaps not common, even so 
late as the middle of the fourth century, for 
the Fathers, Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen, 
Ephrem of Edessa, Ambrose, Basil, and Au- 
gustine, all born of Christian parents and all 
save one during the first half of this century, 
were not baptized until they reached adult life. 
Nor can we be certain which influence was 
stronger in bringing about its general accept- 
ance — the natural and proper feeling that the 
Christian Church was a school for the education 
of young and old in faith and worship, or 
that dark superstition fostered by Augustine, 



The Sacraments. 137 

that even infants dying without the bath of 
Baptism were consigned to everlasting fire. 
It is, however, largely to the influence of this 
Father that we must trace the materialistic be- 
lief concerning Baptism as necessary to save the 
soul from future torment, which in all its hide- 
ous untruth, like a dark shadow, haunted the 
Western Church during the Middle Ages. The 
Church of Rome, in a form so mild, however, 
that Augustine would have censured it as un- 
orthodox, still holds to the doctrine, and thus 
virtually declares that the infinite grace of God, 
the infinite possibilities of the human soul, are 
made dependent by our Heavenly Father on 
the sprinkling of a few drops of water during 
life on the head of a man or child. Our own 
baptismal service, which was framed before the 
Church had fully emancipated itself from the 
unspiritual philosophy of the Middle Ages, is 
not wholly free from traces of the Augustinian 
belief, and many persons, especially of the 
Evangelical wing of the Episcopal Church, have 
been sorely tried by certain clauses in it. 1 It 

1 It would be strange, if in a Church so comprehensive as 
ours, no traces still remained of this mediaeval belief regard- 
ing the power of baptism to produce an entire change in the 



138 Heart of the Creeds. 

has been repeatedly declared, however, both in 
England and America, that the Church im- 
poses no irrational or superstitious view of 
Baptism on her clergy or laity ; that her bap- 
tismal service is not to be interpreted against 
the rational convictions of this or any age. 

As the early simplicity of the doctrine of Bap- 
tism disappeared, there grew up about the rite 
many curious and interesting customs, such as 
exorcism, or setting free from the power of the 
devil, a rite which had hitherto been used only 
in cases where people were supposed to be 

nature, and to deliver the individual from the wrath of God. 
Accordingly we find in use in Episcopal Churches manuals of 
instruction containing questions and answers like the follow- 
ing : 

Q. What are we made by Holy Baptism ? 

A. Members of Christ's Body, the Church. 

Q. What is the result of this ? 

A. We become God's adopted children, and heirs of 
Heaven. 

Q. And what else ? 

A. We are cleansed from sin, and our bodies are made 
temples of the Holy Ghost. 

Q. Of what, then is the Grace of Baptism the seed ? 

A . It is the seed of the spiritual life in the soul of man. 

Q. How do we become members of the Church ? 

A. By being baptized with water in the name of the 
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. 

Q. Is there any sure way to salvation out of the Church ? 

A. There is not. — Trinity Church Catechism. 



The Sacraments. 139 

possessed with demons. Anointing with the 
sacred oil, or chrism, was also one of the con- 
nected rites ; and the laying on of hands, which 
later came to be separated by an interval of 
time from Baptism, and grew into the rite of 
confirmation, which we must always regard as 
the proper completion, with the candidate's own 
free consent, of the baptismal rite which he re- 
ceived in infancy. 

But perhaps the most striking thing in the 
history of the outward part of the rite is the 
change which, in the West, gradually came 
about, from the complete immersion of the 
body in water to the sprinkling of a few drops 
on the candidate's head. " For the first thir- 
teen centuries," says Dean Stanley, " the almost 
universal practice of Baptism was that of which 
we read in the New Testament, and which is 
the very meaning of the word ' baptize,' — that 
those who were baptized were plunged, sub- 
merged, immersed into the water "; and in this 
judgment fully coincide such eminent scholars 
in the English Church as Conybeare and How- 
son, 1 and Bishop Ellicott and Professor 

1 See " Life and Epistle of St. Paul," vol. I, p. 439 ; Cony- 
beare and Howson. 



140 Heart of the Creeds. 

Plumptre, 1 and Church historians like Kurtz 
and Mosheim. 

In the Greek Church trine immersion is the 
rule, and unless it be, as in the early ages, in 
the case of persons too sick or feeble to 
undergo immersion, sprinkling, or even pour- 
ing, is not recognized as baptism. In the 
Western Church, however, gradually, as most 
religious ideas and customs have grown up, im- 
mersion changed to sprinkling, the Cathedral 
of Milan and the large and influential Baptist 
body now alone observing the rite in its primi- 
tive form. The reason for this almost universal 
change in Western Christendom is sufficiently 
clear, and shows how infallibly time discerns 
the essential spirit and meaning of any form of 
truth committed to it. Baptism was simply 
the common act of washing taken to symbolize 
the purification of the soul, the continuous pro- 
cess of new birth that goes on in every truly 
advancing life ; and while in the warm East it 
would be more natural to perform it by dip- 
ping the whole body in water, in colder climates, 
and especially in churches established in cities 

1 Commentary on Matt, iii., I, Mark vii., 4, Luke xi., 38, 
Acts viii., 38 ; Bishop Ellicott and Professor Plumptre. 



The Sacraments. 141 

and towns, or where intelligence and culture 
prevailed, release from the mere letter of obedi- 
ence to Scripture, or of conformity to early 
custom, would necessarily be attended not only 
with indifference to the amount of water used, 
but with a certain repugnance to the public 
bath. There is no question that were the con- 
ditions favorable, a plunge in a lake or river, 
under the blue sky of heaven, in some calm, 
secluded place, would be far more impressive 
than the sprinkling of the forehead with water 
from a stone font or a bowl in a church. 

But, with us, immersion is so manifestly in- 
expedient, so opposed to modern ideas, and 
the spirit that requires it is so unlike the spirit 
of liberty in ritual things inculcated by the 
teaching of Christ, that one cannot help won- 
dering that a large body of religious people 
should still be found clinging to it, and indeed 
making the observance of it their raison d'etre. 

There is no ground on which the change from 
immersion to sprinkling can be justified except 
the ground of enlightened common-sense, but 
there it is safe to rest — unsafe not to rest — all 
our beliefs and opinions. There, likewise, is 
our justification for baptizing infants. Baptism 



142 Heart of the Creeds. 

is intended to symbolize and so keep before 
the world the great truth of regeneration, the 
new birth, or resurrection from the death of 
ignorance, selfishness, lust, and sin, which is a 
continual process in true lives. And being the 
natural door to the Church, which we regard 
as a school for the nurture of Christian life, and 
not an exclusive body of perfectly righteous 
men and women, it is inevitable that we 
should bestow it upon children. We baptize 
them in token of the fact that they are God's 
children ; and as members of a regenerated 
and regenerating society, of which the Church 
is the perpetual type and witness, early incor- 
porate their innocent lives into the Church's 
life. Infant Baptism, and our view of the 
Church as a mixed school for the nurture of 
faith and worship and holy life, are so closely 
bound together that we can hardly think of 
them apart. Under Calvinism, which does not 
recognize God in the soul of every being, and 
under the Independent theory of the Church as 
a company of mature persons voluntarily asso- 
ciating themselves for religious purposes, In- 
fant Baptism has no true place and must inev- 
itably fall into disuse. The Baptists, Charles 



The Sacraments. 143 

Kingsley once said, are the true and logical 
Calvinists, for they do not believe that people 
are God's children until they have passed 
through certain changes of feeling which may 
or may not come, and so they refuse to baptize 
them as if they were such. To us who believe 
that humanity is " God-related," that the hu- 
man is grounded in the divine, the finite in the 
infinite, Infant Baptism is not only richly sig- 
nificant, but, if Baptism is to be maintained 
at all, almost a necessity. 

Thus we may bring our children to Baptism, 
" nothing doubting but that God alloweth this 
charitable work of ours," and giving Him 
thanks that it " hath pleased Him to regen- 
erate them with His Holy Spirit" — that is, to 
give them naturally the privileges of children 
of the Most High, and in order to make them 
sharers in the regenerating influences of Chris- 
tian society, to " incorporate them into His 
holy Church." 

THE LORD'S SUPPER. 

The Lord's Supper originated as naturally 
and simply as Baptism, but under circum- 
stances far more touching. The Master, about 



1 44 Heart of the Creeds. 

to suffer a painful and humiliating death, sat 
with his twelve disciples at night in an upper 
room somewhere in Jerusalem. It was Pass- 
over time, and they, like all faithful Hebrews, 
had come up to the city to celebrate together 
this most significant of all their festivals, and 
now the meal was almost done. We can never 
know all that was passing in Jesus' mind, — how 
much regard he felt for the venerable Passover 
ritual he was so scrupulously observing, nor 
how clearly he foresaw the establishment of a 
religion, looking to him as its founder, which 
should supersede the Hebrew Faith. We can 
never be certain how widely he hoped or ex- 
pected his parting request should be observed, 
but we are told that as he reclined with them 
he took up some of the bread that lay on the 
table, and instead of using the regular words, 
" This is the body of the Passover," or " This 
is the bread of affliction," he said, in view of 
his approaching martyrdom for the principles 
of true religion which he had persistently 
taught, " This is my body which is given for 
you : this do in remembrance of me." Then 
he took up the cup of red wine and water, 
the drinking of which was one of the last acts 



The Sacraments. 145 

of the Festival, and instead of the words com- 
monly uttered, said : This cup is the seal of the 
covenant presently to be made in my blood which 
is to be shed for you. Then after chanting to- 
gether the anthem beginning, " Not unto us, 
not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory for 
Thy mercy and for Thy truth's sake," the group 
arose and passed silently out in the light of the 
great yellow moon into the narrow street, 
through a gate of the city, down into the valley, 
of the Kedron, and so on to the Garden of 
Gethsemane. This is the simple beginning of 
that most venerated and cherished rite of the 
Church, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, 
about which cluster not only some of the 
sacredest and sweetest, but some of the sad- 
dest and most corrupt traditions of the Chris- 
tian world ; now a bond of the holiest brother- 
hood, now a mark of unchristian strife and 
superstition. 

At first it was celebrated at evening, the 
time when Christ had instituted it, and always 
at the close of a common meal called the 
dyaTtrj, or love feast, and with prayer and 
praise, whence from evxapiGria, the Greek 
word for thanksgiving, it came to be called the 



146 Heart of the Creeds. 

eucharist. As early as the third century the 
simple devotional forms with which it was at 
first observed expanded into an " elaborate 
sacramental liturgy," which is the basis of our 
own and of all the Catholic eucharistic liturgies. 
Then it came to be regarded as a holy mys- 
tery, participation in which was necessary to 
insure everlasting life ; and when, as has hap- 
pened in all great Religions, the ideas of a 
priesthood and material sacrifice were devel- 
oped in the Church, the Lord's Supper in the 
hands of the officiating priest became a verita- 
ble sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ, 
into which, by a miracle, as the prayer of con- 
secration was offered, the bread and wine were 
changed. This belief, which to-day finds its 
support in the Roman Catholic Church, and 
which declares that Christ's death is repeated 
every time a priest standing before the altar 
consecrates the bread and wine, was of course a 
late development, and in the theology of the 
enlightened Christian teachers of Alexandria 
had no place. With them, as with us, the 
bread and wine on the altar were simply, as our 
Prayer Book calls them, God's "gifts and 
creatures of bread and wine," which they re- 



The Sacraments, 147 

ceived, according to the Saviour's " holy institu- 
tion, in remembrance of his death and passion." 
The sacrifice they offered to God was " the 
sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving," and of 
their own " souls and bodies," and the body 
and blood of Christ of which they partook was 
" spiritual," not material food. The body of 
Christ was moral truth as displayed in his 
character, and the blood of Christ was love or 
charity. 

The superstitious view of the Lord's Supper 
held by the Latin Church in the Middle Ages 
has, however, its own antiquity. The ancient 
religions of Persia, Egypt, India, and Greece 
all had rites very similar to our Lord's Supper, 
and there were many persons under all these 
Faiths who supposed that in partaking of conse- 
crated bread and wine they were actually eating 
the flesh and drinking the blood of their gods. 
" How can a man be so stupid," says Cicero, 
writing of the heathen eucharist, " as to imagine 
that which he eats to be a god ? " But an- 
tiquity in religious opinions should have little 
weight when it conflicts with intelligence and 
common-sense. We sometimes hear heated 
discussions concerning the propriety of using 



148 Heart of the Creeds. 

lighted candles and special vestments and of 
bowing often in the celebration of the Lord's 
Supper. But the only thing that can make 
these wrong, provided a congregation is pleased 
to have them, is the fact of their testifying to 
a material and unenlightened, and, indeed, 
ancient heathen view of the Sacrament. If the 
introduction of these accessories, harmless in 
themselves, into Christian worship expresses 
simply the desire for a more earnest and beauti- 
ful ceremonial, then no one can say aught 
against them, provided they do not violate 
well-established canons of good taste, but if 
they are meant to symbolize and teach a mate- 
rialistic and magical view of the sweet and 
simple Christian memorial feast, then they are 
harmful and wrong. 

Throughout this chapter we have spoken of 
Baptism and the Lord's Supper in the custom- 
ary way of the Church and the Prayer Book as 
Sacraments, and in the beginning of the chap- 
ter we called them representative Sacraments. 
The word sacrament originally meant an oath 
or pledge, as that taken by Roman soldiers on 
entering the army. The Christian Sacrament, 
then, was the pledge of the Christian's obliga- 



The Sacraments. 149 

tion to be true to the laws of God, and since 
obedience necessarily brings good to man, it 
was likewise regarded as a pledge on God's part, 
as indeed Jesus had declared the Lord's Supper 
to be when he said, " This is the new covenant," 
or this is the pledge of the new covenant, " in 
my blood." ' 

Baptism and the Lord's Supper are outward 
signs or certificates of the relationship between 
God and man. When we baptize a grown man 
or a new-born baby we thereby certify the old 
truth the world needs to be continually re- 
minded of, that we are all children of the 
Heavenly Father, and so under the most sacred 
obligations to be true to duty and to Him. 
We repeat by our act the old truth so easily 
and so often sadly forgotten, that only through 
obedience to God's laws, which are likewise the 
laws of the soul, can the human race find sal- 
vation. This our Baptismal Service makes 
clear when it says to the Sponsors that " Bap- 
tism doth represent unto us our profession ; 
which is, to follow the example of our Saviour 

1 The Catechism brings out the original meaning of the 
word in its definition of Sacrament as not only ' ' an outward 
and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto 
us," but as " a pledge to assure us thereof." 



150 Heart of the Creeds. 

Christ, and to be made like unto him." When 
we come to the Lord's table, we likewise de- 
clare, as the priest who administers the Sacra- 
ment declares, both the good-will of our Heav- 
enly Father toward us, and the obligation we 
are under to love and serve Him and our breth- 
ren. But the question comes, Is not every good 
act, especially every religious act in which we 
engage, likewise a sacrament or pledge on 
God's part and ours? To that question we 
have to answer " Yes." Baptism and the 
Lord's Supper, the bath and the meal, have 
been set apart from life's many sacramental 
acts simply as representative sacraments or 
pledges of the close alliance between God and 
man and the necessity of obedience to all that 
God has anywhere declared as His will con- 
cerning us. Observing one day in seven as, in 
a peculiar sense the Lord's Day, we thereby 
declare that all days are to be regarded as holy 
days. Assembling as churches or congrega- 
tions for Christian worship and other religious 
acts, we thereby testify to the divine life and 
destiny of mankind and the holy brotherhood 
of the race. And in Baptism and the Eucha- 
rist we likewise set forth the sacredness of all 



The Sacraments. 151 

life's common acts and experiences. In the 
spirit of George Herbert's often quoted lines, 
we declare that even the commonest and most 
unhonored tasks are in truth divine. 

How full of instruction and value, then, are 
these ancient rites of the Church to us. How 
sacred should we hold them as we remember 
not only their divine origin, but the faith and 
zeal, the love and reverence and holy life to 
which in all the Christian ages they have wit- 
nessed and ministered. Every Baptism we see 
not only recalls the great truths of the Father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man, but 
seems to connect the present with the past of 
Christianity, and to proclaim the perpetual 
youth of those holy sentiments that inspired 
the multitudes who came to John in the wil- 
derness of Judea ; that stirred the self-sacri- 
ficing first disciples of our Lord ; that made 
the early Christians in the reigns of Nero and 
Trajan martyrs for Christ ; that have inflamed 
the zeal of all noble missionaries and true min- 
isters of religion ; and that have softened and 
sweetened and made saintly the lives of hosts 
of unknown men and women in all lands and 
times. As we kneel at the Lord's Table, and 



152 Heart of the Creeds. 

with bowed heads eat the bread which symbol- 
izes the blessed character of Jesus, and drink 
the wine which represents his love, we are car- 
ried back to Calvary ; and then, as we remem- 
ber that the sacrifice there finished meant the 
perpetual sacrifice, the divine submission of all 
true souls in all ages, how broad and deep and 
tender grows the Christianity we profess ; and 
how many sacred memories are there awak- 
ened, memories of our blessed Lord, and of all 
the prophets and saints of true Religion among 
all nations; memories of the early Christians 
forced to hide in the catacombs, and there 
among the silent dead to celebrate their eucha- 
ristic joy ; memories of our own dear friends 
who once knelt with us at the feast, but who 
have now passed on into the unseen, where 
face to face with truth, they need no longer 
earth's poor symbols. 

These are some of the lessons enfolded in 
those holy rites of Religion, the Christian Sac- 
raments. They are lessons the world can never 
afford to miss, lessons in which no soul can be 
too well instructed, since in them are involved 
all our true well-being here and hereafter. 



THE LITURGY. 



153 



" How cold and dead does a prayer appear that is composed 

in the most elegant forms of speech, when it is not heightened 

by solemnity of phrase from the sacred writngs ! " — Addison. 

" Different tastes find gratification in various forms — -some in 

what is fixed, others in what is free and flowing. 

"The time will come when all outward Churches, with their 
varying laws, will cease and vanish away, but when the true 
and essential Church of Christ will reign forever. Then will 
all members of His body give hearty thanks for whatsoever 
means has, through the gracious providence of God, been 
given whereby they have been brought to the knowledge and 
love of their Lord. 

" But there is no fear of the most excellent minister who 
ever preached, making me desert the Church of England. 
Every time I go, I feel more strongly how beautiful our 
service is. 

" It is one of the advantages of our good Church that we are 
only very partially dependent on the qualifications of the min- 
ister. If he can read, and most clergymen can do that much, 
he must read the liturgy ; all his stupidity, if he be stupid, all 
his carelessness, if he be careless, cannot unmake that into 
anything unscriptural or undevotional." — " Memorials of a 
Quiet Life." 



154 



" The Protestant cast aside the heresies of Rome, and with 
them her arts, by which last rejection he injured his own 
character, cramped his intellect in refusing to it one of its 
noblest exercises, and materially diminished his influence. 

" One thing I note in comparing old prayers with modern 
ones, that however quaint, or however erring, they are always 
tenfold more condensed, comprehensive, and to their pur- 
pose, whatever that may be. There is no dilution in them, 
no vain or monotonous phraseology. They ask for what is 
desired, plainly and earnestly, and never could be shortened 
by a syllable." — Ruskin (" Stones of Venice "). 

"I enjoyed the fine selection of collects read from the 
Liturgy. What an age of earnest faith, grasping a noble con- 
ception of life and determined to bring all things into har- 
mony with it, has recorded itself in the simple, pregnant, 
rhythmical English of those collects and the Bible." — George 
Eliot (extract from a letter). 

"An admirable book, in which the full spirit of the Refor- 
mation breathes out, where, beside the moving tenderness of 
the Gospel, and the manly accents of the Bible, throb the 
profound emotion, the grave eloquence, the noble-mindedness, 
the restrained enthusiasm of the heroic and poetic souls who 
had rediscovered Christianity, and had passed near the fire of 
martyrdom." — Taine, " History of English Literature." 



155 



THE LITURGY. 

If we could have gone with Jesus and his 
disciples into any of the synagogues of Pales- 
tine at the time of Morning or Evening Prayer, 
we should have found the people worshipping 
with a liturgy. With phylacteries bound on 
their foreheads and left arms, and the fringed 
and tasselled Talith falling over their shoulders, 
we should have seen them on their entrance 
bowing in silent prayer, heard them responding 
with an Amen to the Reader's " prayer of adora- 
tion," listened with them to various Scripture 
readings, joined in another short prayer, heard 
the reading of the Song of Moses at the Red 
Sea, and taken part in a short responsive utter- 
ance of praise known as the Kadish, beginning 
" Praise the Lord who is worthy to be praised ! " 
the response to which by the people bowing 
was, " Praised be the Lord who is ever and 
eternally worthy of praise ! " 

After that we should have heard more prayer 

157 



158 Heart of the Creeds. 

and a sublime chant: " Rock of Israel! up! to 
the help of Israel ! save, for Thy promise sake, 
Judah and Israel ! Save us, eternal God, eter- 
nal God of Hosts, whose name is the Holy 
One of Israel ! Blessed be Thou, O Eternal, 
who of old didst redeem Israel ! " And then 
we should have said softly with the entire con- 
gregation the " eighteen Benedictions," or 
" The Prayer," joined in some solemn responses, 
and on Mondays, Thursdays, and Sabbaths 
listened to the reading of the regular lessons 
from the Pentateuch or the Law. The sermon 
would have followed, perhaps preached by 
some one invited from the congregation, after 
which, as with us, with prayers and the bene- 
diction, the service would have closed. 

Wheatley, in his treatise on the Book of 
Common Prayer, like many other writers on 
liturgical worship, has felt it necessary to argue 
for the validity of such worship from the loyalty 
of Jesus and the Apostles to the synagogue 
services ; but we are fortunately not obliged to 
content ourselves with single or exceptional 
testimonies to the propriety of set forms of 
prayer, since every great Religion has developed 
its own peculiar ritual, and has expressed its 



The Liturgy. 159 

reverence in traditional symbols and modes of 
worship. 

So universal, indeed, is the liturgical spirit, 
that the modern Christian sects which have 
discarded ritual, may well be regarded as, in 
this respect at least, out of sympathy with the 
Religion of the ages. It is not true, of course, 
that any religious body is entirely without a 
ritual, but we speak now of the difference be- 
tween an historic and compulsory ritual, and 
one virtually made by each church for itself, 
and subject to the desires or tastes of a partic- 
ular minister or congregation. The early Chris- 
tians, as Christianity gradually separated from 
the older Hebrew Faith, soon made their own 
forms of worship, which at first were compara- 
tively brief and simple, the only form of prayer 
that Jesus had bequeathed to the church being 
the ever-memorable form known as The Lord's 
Prayer. Little by little, however, as the 
churches grew in numbers and influence, both 
parts of Christian worship, the service of com- 
mon prayer and instruction, which took shape 
largely from the synagogue service, and the 
sacramental portion of worship, which neces- 
sarily embodied much of the spirit of the serv- 



1 60 Heart of the Creeds. 

ice of the temple, became more elaborate. 
The psalms and brief doxologies of the one, 
and the prayers and thanksgivings of the other, 
broadened into the various liturgical systems of 
the East and the West. These primitive litur- 
gies Mr. Palmer, in his " Origines Liturgical," 
reduces to four : the great Oriental Liturgy, in 
use from the Euphrates and from the Helles- 
pont to the southern extremity of Greece ; the 
Alexandrian, used in Egypt, Abyssinia, and the 
country from the Mediterranean Sea to the 
west ; the Roman, in use in Italy, Sicily, and 
the civil diocese of Africa ; and the Gallican, 
used in Gaul, Spain, and probably Ephesus, 
until the fourth century. A book called " The 
Apostolical Constitutions," which originated in 
Syria in the latter part of the third and the 
beginning of the fourth centuries, gives the 
common type to which the many later liturgies 
all conform, and after the fourth century we 
find these liturgies bearing the names of Apos- 
tles ; thus the liturgy in use at Jerusalem is 
ascribed to St. James, that of Alexandria to St. 
Mark, that of Rome to St. Peter, and that of 
Milan to St. Barnabas. 

From this it will be seen that there was no 



The Liturgy. 161 

law binding the churches of the early centuries 
to one universal form of worship, but rather 
that each church claimed the right to make its 
own ; nevertheless, as any one who studies 
these primitive liturgies will see, they are per- 
vaded by a common spirit, and alike manifest 
the instinct common to all nations and races to 
make public worship dignified and reverent, and 
to express their sense of religion by means of 
fitting words and symbols. 

The liturgy of the ancient British Church, be- 
fore the Anglo-Saxon invasion, belongs, accord- 
ing to one classification of the early liturgies, 
to a group named after St. John, and, at any 
rate, differs considerably from that in use at 
Rome. In the seventh century, however, sixty- 
eighty years after the beginning of Augustine's 
mission in Britain, although absolute uniformity 
in public worship was not secured, the Roman 
came generally into use, and thus originated 
the various Service Books afterwards used in 
Britain: the Breviary, containing the order for 
Daily Service, the Missal, containing the Com- 
munion Service, compiled about the middle of 
the fifth century, the Antiphonary, the Ben- 
edictional, the Collectorium, the Epistolarium, 



1 62 Heart of the Creeds. 

the Pontifical, the Manual or Ritual, and the 
Book of the Hours. 

After the Norman Conquest in 1078-99, Os- 
mund, Bishop of Salisbury, undertook the re- 
vision of these Service Books, and henceforth 
the Breviary and Missal of Sarum, or accord- 
ing to the use of Sarum, became practically the 
liturgy of the Anglo-Norman Church. ' But in 
the 1 6th century the deeply rooted and steadily 
growing discontent with the prevailing reli- 
gious order showed itself, among other ways, in 
a petition of Convocation to the king for the 
appointment of a committee to reform the 
Ritual and Offices of the Church. Accord- 
ingly, in 1545, an English Service Book called 
the King's Primer appeared, which contained 
the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Com- 
mandments, the Venite, the Te Deum, and 
other hymns and collects, " several of them," 
Wheatley says, " in the same version in which 
we now use them." 

In Edward VI. 's reign, late in 1547, an Eng- 
lish Communion Service was prepared, and 

1 There were still other Uses, however, in the dioceses of 
Lincoln, Hereford, York, and Bangor. All these Uses, or 
Service Books, were, of course, in Latin. 



The Liturgy. 163 

during the next year the complete Prayer Book 
of Edward VI. was compiled by thirteen emi- 
nent divines, among whom were Cranmer and 
Ridley, the latter burned at Oxford in Queen 
Mary's reign, October 16, 1555, the former 
March 21, 1556. This book, to which most 
of the above-mentioned Latin Service Books 
contributed, after being duly approved by 
Parliament, came into general use on Whitsun- 
day, June 9, 1549; and by comparing it with 
the earlier Books of Worship, we shall find 
that Morning and Evening Prayer were sim- 
plified from the Breviary, that the Communion 
Office with Collects, Epistles, and Gospels was 
a translation and adaptation of the Missal, and 
that the occasional Offices represented the 
Manual or Ritual, while those of Ordination 
and Confirmation were taken with modifica- 
tions from the Pontifical. We shall find, like- 
wise, how many objectionable things in the 
earlier liturgy, such as Litanies to Mary, and 
fictitious matter relating to Saints, were wisely 
thrown aside by the Reformers. 

The feeling of hostility toward Rome had 
grown so rapidly that this Book did not long 
satisfy the popular demand for a liturgy more 



164 Heart of the Creeds, 

in harmony with the spirit of primitive Chris- 
tianity. Accordingly, Archbishop Cranmer, 
with the aid of Martin Bucer, a German, and 
Peter Martyr, an Italian Protestant, both 
learned men, reviewed it, adding the Sentences, 
Exhortation, Confession, and Absolution ; and 
omitting some things such as Prayers for the 
Dead, 1 and a few Rubrics. This Book was 
confirmed by Parliament in 155 1, and an Act of 
Uniformity passed in April, 1552, directed its 
general use. But it is not known that Convo- 
cation sanctioned it, and it was probably never 
generally adopted. 

King Edward died July 6, 1553, and Queen 
Mary restored the Latin Missal ; but after her 
death in November, 1558, her sister Elizabeth, 
desiring to restore the English Service and "to 
unite the nation in one faith," ordered a re- 
view of the two Prayer Books of Edward's 
reign. Two of the ten divines chosen to carry 
out this revision were Matthew Parker after- 
ward, and Edmund Grindall then, Archbishop 

1 These Prayers for the Dead, which many persons in the 
Church now desire to have restored, were contained in the 
Communion Service and in the Burial Office. One of the 
omitted Rubrics was that directing the mixing of water with 
wine at the time of the celebration of Holy Communion. 



The Liturgy. 165 

of Canterbury, and the result of the reviewers' 
work was the restoration of substantially the 
second Book of Edward VI. 's reign, for this 
Book, rather than the first, was taken as the 
basis of their work, and the changes made in it 
were very few. It came into use the 24th of 
June, 1559, an d from this time onward the 
English Prayer Book received few alterations. 
In 1663, the first year of the reign of James 
I., a few slight changes were made, and later, in 
the reign of Charles II., a few more, and so, 
with the generally desirable, yet as regards the 
substance of the liturgy, unimportant changes 
made by the American Church in 1789, the 
Book of Common Prayer has come to us. 

This, in brief outline, is the history of the 
Prayer Book as a whole, and when we come to 
a consideration of its details, we shall see at 
how many points it touches the history of Re- 
ligion. We read the Psalter and are carried 
back to the Hebrew Temple service centuries 
before Christ, when the same psalms were 
chanted responsively by the Hebrew congrega- 
tions. The Venite of our Morning Prayer (the 
95th Psalm) takes us back not only to the primi- 
tive liturgies of the East and West, but to the 



1 66 Heart of the Creeds. 

Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, for which it was 
perhaps originally composed. The Te Deum, 
which is, at least, 1500 years old, brings us face 
to face with Ambrose and the baptism of Au- 
gustine. The Benedicite, " O all ye works of 
the Lord, bless ye the Lord," was an ancient 
hymn in the Jewish Church, and was sung by 
the early Christians. The Apostles' Creed, the 
Creed in its Western form, introduces us to the 
simple, uncontroversial faith of primitive Chris- 
tianity. The Nicene Creed, the Creed in its 
Eastern form, recalls the most dignified and 
most important General Council of the Church. 
The Lord's Prayer and the Gospels bring us 
face to face with our Lord himself. The Collect 
for Peace in the Morning and Evening Prayer 
comes from the Sacramentary of Gregory the 
Great, an early and eminent Bishop of Rome, 
and is also associated with Augustine's mission 
to Britain. The Collect for the Clergy and 
People comes likewise from Gregory's ancient 
Prayer Book, and has been used in the Church 
of England for more than 1200 years. The 
prayer of St. Chrysostom brings before us that 
ancient Greek pulpit orator in his church at 
Constantinople, since it is from the liturgy that 



The Lihirgy. 167 

bears his name. Part of the Gloria in Excelsis 
is ascribed to Telesphorus, who is supposed to 
have composed it about the year 137. The 
Litany marks one of the most important epochs 
in general history, the time when in the Roman 
Empire, tottering to its fall, the terror inspired 
by the invasions of hordes of Barbarians was 
increased by droughts, pestilences, and earth- 
quakes, and the Church itself was rent by fierce 
internal strifes. In the open streets and fields 
of France, the centre of these disorders, it is 
said the first Litany was sung or shouted by 
terror-stricken multitudes, who hoped thus to 
avert the judgments of God. In the light of 
its origin we can understand those strong ex- 
pressions : the offences of our forefathers ; 
lightning and tempest ; plague, pestilence, and 
famine ; battle and murder and sudden death ; 
desolate and oppressed ; troubles and adversities. 
Most of the Collects are very ancient, having 
been framed probably by St. Jerome (who se- 
lected also the Epistles and Gospels as they 
now stand), and then put in order and in- 
creased by Gelasius, a Bishop of Rome in the 
fifth century, and later revised by Pope Gre- 
gory the Great in the year 600 ; while some 



1 68 Heart of the Creeds. 

alterations in them date, with the Sentences, 
Exhortation, Confession, and Absolution, to 
the time of the Reformation. To the Great 
Bible of Tyndale, Coverdale, and Cranmer, of 
1 535-1 540, rather than to the Version of King 
James, of 161 1, or the Bishop's Bible, of 1571, 
we may trace our Prayer Book Psalter. The Of- 
fertory Sentences are not from any recognized 
version, but were probably translated by Cran- 
mer, as also the Benedictus, Magnificat, and 
Nunc Dimittis. The Epistles and Gospels are 
from King James' Version, while the Psalms 
sung regularly in Morning and Evening Prayer 
agree in the main with the Great Bible. Dean 
Stanley eloquently says : " The Prayer Book, as 
it stands, is a long gallery of ecclesiastical his- 
tory, which, to be understood and enjoyed 
thoroughly, absolutely compels a knowledge of 
the greatest events and names of all periods of 
the Christian Church. To Ambrose we owe 
the present form of our Te Deum ; Charlemagne 
breaks the silence of our ordination prayers by 
the Veni Creator Spiritus. The persecutions 
have given us one Creed, and the Empire an- 
other. The name of the first great Patriarch 
of the Byzantine Church (Chrysostom) closes 



The Liturgy. 169 

our daily service ; the Litany is the bequest of 
the first great Patriarch of the Latin Church 
(Gregory) amidst the terrors of the Roman 
pestilence. Our Collects are the joint produc- 
tion of the Fathers, the Popes, and the Reform- 
ers. Our Communion Service bears the traces 
of every fluctuation of the Reformation through 
the two extremes of the reign of Edward to the 
conciliating policy of Elizabeth, and the reac- 
tionary zeal of the Restoration. The more 
comprehensive, the more free, the more impar- 
tial is our study of ecclesiastical history, the 
more it will be in accordance with the spirit 
and letter of the Church of England." ' 

This, then, is the Prayer Book used in every 
church of the Anglican faith and order through- 
out Christendom. It is inevitable that a book 
with such a history should reflect phases of 
thought and feeling that the world for the 
time, and perhaps forever, has outgrown, and 
should contain words and phrases now become 
obsolete. And it is quite as impossible that 
it should conform solely to the experience of 
any one age or phase of thought. In studying 
it we must not allow our minds to be diverted 

1 Eastern Church, chap, ii., p. 60. 



1 70 Heart of the Creeds, 

from its essential principles and its leading 
purpose, to any mere technicality of expres- 
sion or phrase that may seem ambiguous. 
Spiritual birth and death and resurrection, 
humiliation and triumph, self-sacrifice and rec- 
onciliation with God, the true relation of tem- 
poral and eternal, human and divine, — these are 
the essential truths of the Book of Common 
Prayer. And all these vital truths expressed 
in the seasons of the Church Year group them- 
selves around the great doctrine of all true 
religious thought, the doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion. In that doctrine of God in humanity, lie 
the germs that have expanded into the various 
forms of common prayer and praise, the Sacra- 
mental liturgy, and the occasional Offices. From 
it, as the central doctrine of all devotional 
thought and life, come the observances of Ad- 
vent and Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, 
Whitsuntide, and Trinity, — all commemorative 
of that life that forever stands as the type of 
the life of humanity, the Christ in his headship 
of the body of which we are members. 

For us who believe in prayer as the instinct- 
ive utterance of the heart, who are content to 
pray without necessarily framing a doctrine of 



The Liturgy. 171 

prayer, what words can be found more simple, 
more comprehensive, more tender, than the 
words of our Collects. How direct and natural 
are the prayers for light and guidance, for the 
increase of faith, hope, and charity, for defence 
against dangers temporal and spiritual, for right 
judgment in all the affairs of life, and for stead- 
fastness in the way of truth. And how broad 
and rational is the underlying spirit of the 
Prayer Book. In the familiar Collect for Peace 
it recognizes most fully that " all holy desires, 
all good counsels, all just works " proceed from 
the inspiration of God. Following the teach- 
ing of Jesus and Paul, it declares that " all our 
doings without charity are nothing worth." 
Where it has one expression that would seem 
to make salvation in anywise dependent upon 
metaphysical or doctrinal rectitude, like Christ's 
own teachings, it has a hundred testifying to 
the supreme importance of righteous life. Its 
Creeds are catholic as truth itself, its doctrine of 
the Church is not limited by the accidents or 
expedients of a single age or intellectual con- 
dition. 1 It not only embodies the divine rich- 

1<( The mystical body of Thy Son, which is the blessed com- 
pany of all faithful people." — Service for Holy Communion. 



172 Heart of the Creeds. 

ness of the words of Christ, but it reflects the 
inspired zeal of St. Paul, the love of St. John, 
the fervor of St. Peter, the catholicity of 
Athanasius, the vast learning of the most gifted 
of the Fathers — Origen, the eloquence of the 
golden-mouthed Chrysostom, the logic of Au- 
gustine, the wisdom of Cranmer and his fellow- 
workers ; and among its sacred associations are 
enshrined the devotion and faith, the prayers 
and tears and sufferings of Apostles and Mar- 
tyrs, holy women and Christ-like men, that 
whole vast company " who, having finished 
their course in faith, do now rest from their 
labors." 

And when we remember, as we all should, 
that long ago, our own forefathers in England, 
in their times of joy or sorrow, of peace or 
penitence, as they knelt together in the 
churches of the motherland, used the same Col- 
lects, sang the same Te Deum, offered the peti- 
tions of the same Litany, and thus expressed 
emotions of religious joy or sorrow, identical 
with those that we their children feel, how in- 
comparably sacred must the English Prayer 
Book seem. Our ritual, in grandeur and im- 
pressiveness, is far below that of ancient Faiths 



The Liturgy. 1 73 

like those of Assyria or Egypt ; and indeed in 
perfection of religious art, no Reformed Church 
can compare with the Church of Rome, but 
taken all in all, what service speaks so directly 
to the heart, or so simply and fittingly ex- 
presses the Religion of mankind, the primitive 
Faith of the Church, founded by our Divine 
Master, as the service of the English Book of 
Common Prayer. The failure to appreciate its 
merits among people of Puritan descent, a mis- 
take that is necessarily fast curing itself, is due, 
not, as many have supposed, to the possession 
of more vital piety or more rational beliefs by 
people who use no Book of Prayer, but to that 
spirit of excessive protest, which led the Puri- 
tans in England and America into fanatical in- 
tolerance of much that the wisest minds in all 
ages have loved and upheld. 1 

The liturgy of the Prayer Book is not per- 

1 No movement to me is more interesting than that of the 
return in our day of so many of the children of the Puritan 
Separatists to the ancient Church and her liturgy. For ten 
centuries and more our ancestors sang the same hymns, 
prayed the same prayers, knelt at the same altars, and when- 
ever the religious horizon widens, and the narrowness of 
present sect limitations appears, we seem to turn as if by 
natural instinct to the familiar ways which through mistaken 
conviction those ancestors left only a few generations ago. 



1 74 Heart of the Creeds, 

feet, but its spirit is in harmony with the lead- 
ing idea of our Church, which is that of religious 
education, and to him who uses it, it becomes 
ever, insensibly, more and more sacred and 
dear. There are times when extemporaneous 
prayers may be necessary or at least desirable, 
but there can be little doubt that the liturgical 
instinct which has expressed itself in all great 
Faiths, demands for the permanent and abiding 
use of worship a well ordered and uniform 
ritual, and, one which shall bear the impress, 
not of a single mind, but of many minds in 
many successive ages of religious thought and 
culture. As we have already said, modern ex- 
temporaneous worship receives no sanction 
from any of the great Faiths of the world, nor 
could it have been desired even by those ultra 
Protestants who have given the tone to much 
of modern Christianity, Calvin and John Knox, 
for both these men compiled for use in their 
day liturgies or Books of Common Prayer. 
Nor does it satisfy the better educated people 
of any denomination to-day. Whenever the 
spirit of religion has been broad and catholic, 
the value of historic liturgies has been felt, and 
now that the more enlightened people of mod- 



The Liturgy, 1 75 

ern sects have come into some comprehension 
of the largeness of Christianity, they feel the 
lack of catholicity, lack of dignity of their non- 
liturgical worship. 

Little by little, especially among the chil- 
dren of the Puritans, worship, seeking forms 
that are adequate for its true expression, is 
turning itself into the well worn channels that 
the Catholic faith has made, is re-adopting the 
forms rendered sacred by nearly two thousand 
years of constant Christian use. The Prayer 
Book, both as a literary treasure and as the 
noblest manual of devotion in the English- 
speaking world, is one of the most valuable parts 
of our inheritance as children of the ancient 
Mother Church. 

To its refining and spiritualizing influence 
the modern world now owes more than it can 
possibly understand, and as Christianity again 
returns to the spirit of the Christ and his Apos- 
tles, the ancient liturgy shall exert a still wider 
influence and secure the love of many hearts 
that have not yet entered into sympathy with 
its divine richness. 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 



177 



" Death, if I am right, is, in the first place, the separation 
of two things, soul and body, nothing else. And after they 
are separated, they retain their several characteristics which 
are much the same as in life." — Plato, " Georgias." 

" This wonderfully woven life of ours shall not be broken 
by death in a single strand of it ; it shall run on and on, an 
unbroken life, upheld by the will of the Eternal." — -New- 
man Smyth. 

" The desire of knowledge God has planted naturally in us, 
as hunger is natural in our bodies, or the want of light in our 
eyes. And the eye is not a more certain indication that light 
is to be given than our desire to know divine things is that we 
shall be permitted to know them." — Horace Bushnell. 

" My mind can take no hold of the present world, nor rest 
in it for a moment, but my whole nature rushes on with irre- 
sistible force towards a future and better state of being." — 
Fichte. 

" My own dim life should teach me this : 
That life shall live forevermore ; 
Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is. 

" Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 

Thou madest man, he knows not why ; 
He thinks he was not made to die ; 
And thou hast made him : thou art just." 

— Tennyson. 
"It is in Heaven only that I find any basis for our poor 
pilgrimage on this earth." — Carlyle. 

" When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so 
great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of pene- 



178 



trating into the future ; when I behold such a number of arts 
and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries thence aris- 
ing, I believe and am firmly convinced that a nature which 
contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal." — 
Cicero. 

" The seed dies into a new life, and so does man." — 
George MacDonald. 

" We are immortal. Death, as we call it, may touch our 
sensible vesture, but it is only a vesture which decays. Our 
being goes on in another life ; for we live in His life, and our 
true world is not this world. ' We look for a city which hath 
foundations.' We abide in Him, and He in us, and He abides 
forever. 

" Does there seem to be a Spirit who leads us through life, 
conquering the years in us, redeeming us from all evil, bring- 
ing us calm out of sorrow, faith out of doubt, strength out of 
trial ? And when He has made us great of spirit like Himself, 
does He bury all that wealth of heart in nothingness ? 

" What incredible thing is this? Only credible if there be 
no God." — Stopford Brooke. 

" I do not know whether I shall live again on earth or else- 
where ; whether I shall be a being of three dimensions or four, 
or of no dimensions at all ; whether I shall be in space or out 
of space. It is far better to give up speculations about acci- 
dental trifles, such as these ; for accidents they are, as com- 
pared with the essence of the second life, which consists in 
Love." — Edwin A. Abbott. 

" Then climb and climb forever toward the day, 
And fear not thou shalt miss the one true way." 

— Samuel Greg. 



179 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 

The question of a future life, in its religious 
or its speculative aspect, is of the greatest 
interest to every intelligent mind. We have 
so insatiable a craving for immortality, and are 
so frequently reminded of the brevity of this 
life, that we cannot get thoughts of the future 
far away from us if we would. And in most 
minds, could we know them well, there are, no 
doubt, the same questionings and balancings 
of probabilities regarding the condition of the 
future life, if there be any, that we are so 
familiar with in ourselves. Shall we continue 
to exist when we have closed our eyes upon 
this world, and, if so, how closely shall the 
life beyond resemble, or how far differ from, 
that we are living now? To the first of these 
questions, many of the most enlightened minds 
have felt obliged, from all they knew of God 
and man, to answer, Yes. To the second, the 
wisest men have never tried to give a very 

181 



1 82 Heart of the Creeds. 

definite answer, and the two Creeds of Catho- 
lic Christendom which distinctly affirm belief in 
the fact of future existence are utterly silent as 
to its precise conditions. 

We are, however, perfectly familiar with the 
ideas of the future that were common in the 
Calvinistic churches a little while ago, but of 
late have almost disappeared throughout New 
England, — ideas which, based on the most lit- 
eral views of the Bible, shaped themselves into 
crude and sensuous doctrines of heaven and 
hell. The sermons of Jonathan Edwards, 
preached in Northampton 150 years ago, pre- 
sent these doctrines in their naked deformity, 
and shall stand perhaps to all time as the finest 
testimony in Calvinistic literature to the want 
of imagination and failure to comprehend the 
Bible's true character of the Calvinistic mind. 

But we must not blame the Calvinists as if 
they alone were responsible for the crude popu- 
lar theories of the future held in past times. 
Dante's " Inferno," as well as Milton's " Para- 
dise Lost," portrayed for the world a " mapped 
and measured " heaven and hell; Chrysostom, 
as well as Jonathan Edwards, depicted the tor- 
ments of the lost and the joys of the saved in 



The Future Life. 183 

language full of gross, material figures. In- 
deed the Calvinists inherited much that was 
worst in all their theology from the Mediaeval 
Church. 

In his recent book, " The Destiny of Man," 
Mr. John Fiske has shown that the Doctrine 
of Development, as expounded by Mr. Darwin 
and Mr. Herbert Spencer, in its relation to 
man, almost necessarily implies higher ranges 
of existence, in which his being shall have 
room to perfect itself. From the nature of 
the case, he argues, scientific demonstration 
of future existence is out of the question, 
since we cannot test the matter except by 
dying, but equally impossible is scientific dem- 
onstration of no future life, and ** he who re- 
gards Man as the consummate fruition of cre- 
ative energy, and the chief object of Divine 
care, is almost irresistibly driven to the belief 
that the soul's career is not completed with the 
present life upon earth. . . . From the first 
dawning of life we see all things working to- 
gether toward one mighty goal, the evolution 
of the most exalted spiritual qualities which 
characterize humanity. . . . Are Man's high- 
est spiritual qualities, into the production of 



184 Heart of the Creeds. 

which all this creative energy has gone, to dis- 
appear with the rest ? Has all this work been 
done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a 
bubble that bursts, a vision that fades ? Are 
we to regard the Creator's work as like that of 
a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just 
for the pleasure of knocking them down? For 
aught that science can tell us. it may be so, but 
I can see no good reason for believing any 
such thing. On such a view the riddle of the 
universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. 
Why, then, are we any more called upon to 
throw away our belief in the permanence of 
the spiritual element in Man than we are called 
upon to throw away our belief in the constancy 
of Nature?" 

It is most certainly true that, whatever 
doubts may arise in individual minds concern- 
ing personal immortality, science has nothing 
tc say against it, and when we consider the 
almost universal longing for it, the tendency of 
the race to believe in it, the affirmations of 
master minds like Plato's, Plutarch's, Montes- 
quieu's, Emerson's — minds necessarily free 
from narrow religious bias of any sort ; when 
we think of the latent capacities and powers of 



The Future Life, 185 

man, of some of which we have as yet received 
only the feeblest intimations, of the marvellous 
spiritual grasp of his nature and the hunger of 
his soul for truth and perfect life ; when we re- 
member how he can love and hate and pity 
and forgive ; how he can hope and enjoy and 
suffer, we cannot escape the conviction that a 
larger sphere must somewhere be appointed 
him, in which to work out a grander destiny 
than he ever approaches in his brief and limited 
career upon this earth. We might possibly 
think that the great dramatic purpose of God 
needed for its fulfilment that the temporary 
flame that burns in human souls should forever 
die and disappear, and that it was our duty to 
be willing to yield up our lives, and sink into 
nothingness, if so, God might be better glorified, 
were it not for all we have learned to believe, 
not only of His love and sympathy for us, but 
of the divine relationship between His intelli- 
gence and ours. When we examine our own 
thought, which we believe to be His thought 
in us, and find what it has to say concerning 
justice and righteousness and the enduring 
power of love, we are sure He has not raised 
us up to love and hate and hunger and grope 



1 86 Heart of the Creeds. 

for light denied us, and in the height of the 
struggle to go down mocked and disappointed 
into everlasting unconsciousness. The soul, 
which is an effluence from Him, might at death, 
as many have believed, be swept back once more 
into Deity, if it were not that in projecting our 
souls into existence, He has chosen to give us 
each an identity as real as His own, and to 
make even the thought of non-existence as im- 
possible to us as to Himself. We cannot think 
of ourselves as ceasing to exist. The effort to 
imagine ourselves dead, is always accompanied 
by the wider thought of ourselves as con- 
sciously alive to know that we are dead. We 
cannot get away from the belief in personal im- 
mortality, however we may try, or however 
loudly the voices of doubt and despondency 
within us may call to us to yield up our faith. 
And when to the revelation of eternal life given 
us by our own souls we add the calm and un- 
wavering belief of Christ in the continuance of 
existence, we may well feel that but one answer 
can be given to the question so often and eager- 
ly asked, " Does death end all ? " The immor- 
tality we desire and have a right to expect is 
more than the resumption of our souls back into 



The Future Life. 187 

Deity, more than the simple persistence of the 
life principle we possess through other forms of 
being, more than the mere immortality of our 
influence in the race, it is the continuance of 
conscious, personal existence for ever and ever. 
The aged Victor Hugo expressed the confi- 
dent belief of many of the maturest minds of 
the ages when he wrote : 

" I feel in myself the future life. I am like a for- 
est which has been more than once cut down. The 
new shoots are stronger and livelier than ever. I 
am rising, I know, toward the sky. The sunshine 
is on my head. The earth gives me its generous 
sap, but heaven lights me with the reflection of un- 
known worlds. 

" You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of 
bodily powers. Why then is my soul the more lu- 
minous when my bodily powers begin to fail ? Win- 
ter is on my head and eternal spring is in my heart- 
Then I breathe, at this hour, the fragrance of the 
lilacs, the violets, and the roses as at twenty years. 

" The nearer I approach the end the plainer I hear 
around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds 
which invite me. It is marvellous yet simple. It is 
a fairy tale, and it is history. For half a century I 
have been writing my thoughts in prose, verse, his- 
tory, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, 
ode, song — I have tried all. But I feel that I have 
not said the thousandth part of what is in me. 



1 88 Heart of the Creeds, 

" When I go down to the grave I can say, like so 
many others : ! I have finished my day's work ' ; 
but I cannot say : ' I have finished my life.' My 
day's work will begin again the next morning. The 
tomb is not a blind alley ; it is a thoroughfare. It 
closes in the twilight to open with the dawn. 

" I improve every hour because I love this world 
as my fatherland. My work is only a beginning. 
My monument is hardly above its foundation. I 
would be glad to see it mounting and mounting for- 
ever. The thirst for the infinite proves infinity." 

The common belief of Calvinism, based on a 
literal view of certain passages of Scripture, was 
not only that at death people went on living, 
but that they went on living under certain fixed 
and unalterable conditions ; conditions of ma- 
terial bliss or woe that should be the same mil- 
lions of ages hence as they were the next mo- 
ment after death. The two chief elements this 
doctrine contained, were the ideas of absolute 
stagnation of life in the world to come, and of 
endless duration. It is almost unnecessary to 
say that in whatever the New Testament says 
about the future life, the first of these ideas 
is not to be found at all, and the second, which 
Calvinism always made most prominent, is really 
incidental. Without discussing passages sepa- 



The Future Life. 189 

rately, it may be stated that Christ in all his 
discourses used the familiar language of Jewish 
theology to impress on people's minds the pro- 
found truths he desired to make them feeL 
When he spoke of heaven and hell, of Abra- 
ham's bosom and paradise, it was not to map 
out and localize the future for the Jews to 
whom he spoke, but to make them feel the 
supreme importance of the principles of right- 
eousness. The Jews in his time had a certain 
sensuous imagery under which no doubt the 
most enlightened of them concealed their true 
thought, but which to the mass of the people 
was exactly descriptive of the reality of the 
future life. The primitive Hebrew belief seems 
to have been that the spirits of those who died 
went indiscriminately into sheol, a vast subter- 
ranean tomb — the underworld, — with barred and 
bolted gates, where they lay silent like corpses. 
If there were distinctions there, they were not 
moral, but national or social, and to that under- 
world Jehovah's reign was believed not to ex- 
tend. Thus the Psalmist says with true devo- 
tional feeling, and in protest against excluding 
God from any part of His universe : " If I as- 
cend up into heaven, thou art there ; if I make 



190 Heart of the Creeds. 

my bed in hell, {sheol) behold thou art there." Later 
the belief seems to have grown up that from the 
dominion of death, the king of sheol, faithful 
Israelites should eventually be released, while the 
wicked and Gentiles should still be kept in the 
underworld. It was not until after the Exile, 
which terminated in the fifth century before 
Christ, that the belief grew up which seems to 
have become fully settled before Christ's time, 
that the unseen world comprised two distinct 
localities — a Paradise, and an Inferno, the ge- 
henna of St. Matt, v., 22, 29, 30 ; x., 28 ; St. Mark 
ix., 43, 45, 47 ; St. Luke xii., 5 ; and a few other 
passages. In many places in the New Testament 
the word translated hell in the authorized ver- 
sion is the Greek word hades, which, like the 
Hebrew word sheol, means simply the under- 
world, and has no necessary connection with 
the thought of retribution. 

The Book of Enoch, which originated in 
Palestine in the second century before Christ, 
and the second Book of Esdras (chap, ii., 19), 
describe Paradise as a restored Eden, where all 
is peace and prosperity, where there are moun- 
tains covered with lilies and roses, where milk 
and honey are plentiful, and as in the Revela- 



The Future Life. 1 9 1 

tion, trees perpetually bear delicious fruits. 
Another figure under which the Hebrews de- 
scribed Paradise was that of a banquet with 
the Patriarchs and Prophets, 1 where reclining 
on couches some might even lean their heads 
on Abraham's bosom, than which, to a faithful 
Jew, no honor could be greater, no bliss more 
perfect. Correspondingly dreadful was their 
language concerning the abode of woe. They 
named it gehenna, or the valley of the sons of 
Hinnom, because in that valley, just outside 
the city walls, the offal from the Temple sacri- 
fices and all sorts of rubbish were made to feed 
a fire that rarely, if ever, was suffered to go 
out. It was the perpetual abode of corruption 
and fire, and its ghastly associations supplied 
terrible images by which to describe the condi- 
tion and the place of lost spirits. Indeed, in 
the lapse of time, it came to be regarded as one 
of the mouths of the pit of destruction itself. 
This will throw light on some of the strongly 
figurative language of the New Testament con- 
cerning the future life : Jesus, as we have seen, 
spoke to his people in their own language ; 
their familiar religious rites and doctrines he 

1 See St. Luke xiii., 29 ; xvi., 22. 



192 Heart of the Creeds. 

did not assail, nor in enforcing truth upon 
them did he ignore their own metaphors. But 
it will be noticed that he uses Jewish figures 
only when talking to the Sanhedrin, or the 
High Priest, or Nathaniel, not when talking to 
the Roman governor, to whom Jewish figures 
would have had little meaning. 

Thus we see the origin of certain opinions 
concerning the future life that have prevailed 
in the Christian Church. It is not necessary 
here to trace these in detail. According to the 
temper of theologians in the Early Church, 
and through the Middle Ages, belief in the 
future assumed a milder or more vindictive 
tone. Some believed in endless tortures for 
the wicked and endless bliss for the good ; with 
some the hottest fires of perdition were re- 
served for morally wicked men, and with some, 
those whose thought deviated from established 
lines were to suffer the worst punishments. 
Some, like Origen, with a finer ethical sense 
and a truer belief in God, in the spirit of St. 
Paul * looked forward and prophesied the final 

1 See I Cor. xv., 22, 24-28 ; Romans viii., 21, 23 ; also 
Hebrews ii., 14. In the New Testament there are as many 
texts for the doctrine of the Restitution of all things as for any 
other doctrine of the future. 



The Future Life. 193 

triumph of righteousness and peace. In the 
Early Church, the doctrine of an Intermediate 
State between this world and the final heaven 
and hell was commonly taught, a doctrine 
which afterward in the Middle Ages held its 
place as a belief in Purgatory, whose cleansing 
fires should make it possible for some of the 
many millions who had died impenitent or un- 
baptized to be purified and so at last reach 
heaven. In the later Calvinistic belief there 
was no such merciful provision, the soul at 
death being received at once into unending 
bliss, or driven into unending woe. Taine says 
of the Puritans : " The feeling of the difference 
there is between good and evil had filled for 
them all time and space, and had become in- 
carnate and expressed for them by such words 
as Heaven and Hell," and as one can see from 
the writings of such men as Jonathan Edwards, 
no palliation of the sufferings themselves, nor 
shortening of their duration, was felt to be pos- 
sible for " sinners in the hands of an angry 
God." 

Under all these gross, mistaken conceptions 
of the future we may discern, however, the 
true principles Christ taught ; of which our 



1 94 Heart of the Creeds. 

Church, rational and moderate, by her refusal in 
all her history to adopt the Calvinistic lan- 
guage, and her little interest in current disputes 
concerning the state of the departed, teaches 
us chiefly to think. 

Heaven and hell are states of the soul, not 
places of arbitrary reward and punishment. 
Jesus taught nothing concerning the objective 
conditions of the life beyond ; he did teach that 
obedience to God's laws brings life and immor- 
tality, that disobedience brings death, which is 
the loss of light and power. In this world 
and all worlds, it was the mission of his 
life to teach, righteousness redeems the soul, 
lifting it to heights of knowledge and peace 
it has not known before, while sin narrows the 
life and works therein confusion and dismay. 
No word has been more common in Christian 
speech than the word salvation, and no word 
has been more mistakenly or at least unintelli- 
gently used. To be saved, means to be under- 
going that process of growth in knowledge and 
goodness, that leads gradually onward toward 
the state — for man never attainable — of abso- 
lute perfection ; to be lost, means to be slowly 
falling away from light and truth, to be going 



The Future Life. 195 

downward not upward in the scale of being. 
When Jesus wept over Jerusalem and her unbe- 
lief, and bade the weary world before him drop 
its burdens and replace them with his easy yoke, 
or flee from wrath to come, he was not contem- 
plating a lake of burning sulphur on the one 
hand and a paradise of sensual delight on the 
other, but rather the ruin of the moral nature, 
or the perfection of the life of man. With a 
power of spiritual vision that no other possessed, 
he looked into the soul of man and was filled 
with enthusiasm over its divine possibilities, or 
else with unutterable grief over its prophecies 
of ruin and decay ; and like all the greatest re- 
ligious teachers, he sought to reveal to men the 
great unacknowledged fact of their sonhood of 
God, and so to make them conscious of the di- 
vine power within them by means of which they 
might rise superior to the limitations of sin and 
sense. His figurative language, which to later 
theologians seemed to imply that throughout 
unending ages men should remain just as this 
life left them, really implied endless expansion 
and growth. The word which in our author- 
ized version is sometimes translated eternal, 
sometimes everlasting, contained, as Christ used 



196 Heart of the Creeds. 

it, far more and other than the mere notion of 
endlessness of time. Eternal life was the free- 
dom from all limitations that the soul gains by 
increased consciousness of God ; eternal death 
was the loss of light and liberty, the narrowness 
and slavery of soul that comes when God is 
forgotten and His laws disobeyed. The essen- 
tial idea in the word life is that of change : no 
living soul can stand still here or hereafter ; nor 
in view of the instinctive belief in the trium- 
phant power of goodness which has expressed 
itself in those passages of Scripture that speak 
of future redemption for the race, and the 
final conquest of the kingdoms of this world 
by God, and that every day finds expression in 
the devout hopefulness and cheerful prophecy 
of reverent minds, can we believe that sin 
and suffering are to go on in the universe 
forever. 

Emerson quotes George Fox as saying : 
" There is an ocean of darkness and death, but 
withal an infinite ocean of light and love which 
flows over that of darkness," and this is the be- 
lief of healthy souls. 

The problem of evil has always been regarded 
as insoluble on the theory of a perfect God, and 



The Fiiture Life. 197 

yet may we not be approaching an explanation 
of it when we think of " imperfection as in 
some sort essential to all that we know of life. 
Sign of life in a mortal body, sign of a state of 
progress, of change " ? x Cardinal Newman says 
very significantly : " The laws of the universe, 
the principles of truth, the relation of one thing 
to another, their qualities and virtues, the order 
and harmony of the whole, all that exists is 
from God ; and if evil is not from Him, as as- 
suredly it is not, this is because evil has no sub- 
stance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, 
perversion, or corruption of that which has." 2 
If, then, evil is the excess, negation, or wrong 
use of the good, its true corrective will be 
found, as in the universe, so in the individual 
life, in keeping all the factors of life in proper 
balance. To do less or more than law requires, 
to warp things from their proper uses, to give 
the lower the place of the higher, to make aims 
that are not the best life's chief aims, will assur- 
edly result in evil. To observe the laws that 
God has affixed to the nature of things will 



1 John Ruskin. 

2 " Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Edu- 
cation," pp. 91-97. 



198 Heart of the Creeds. 

redeem the world and all its conscious life from 
death and despair. 

" O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself," says 
the Prophet Hosea, speaking for God, " but in 
Me is thy help," and every soul in all the world 
that has learned that living for self means 
death, and living for God means life, has un- 
derstood the double note of despondency and 
hope that sounds in the Prophet's words : 
" God has not appointed us to wrath, but to 
obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ." 
Righteousness is more deeply rooted in our 
natures than sin ; righteousness is our true life, 
sin is life's contradiction ; and it may be over- 
come. The Calvinistic view of man as natural- 
ly lost to God, may sometimes seem to be true, 
but it is not true. God's erring children may 
be lost to themselves, but they can never be 
lost to Him. 

We have dwelt thus, at length, on the nature 
of salvation, because right views of eternal life 
and death, fulfilment and destruction, are at the 
bottom of all true conceptions of the future. 
We do not know what the conditions of the 
future will be, what new bodies we shall wear, 
what new homes we shall live in, what new em- 



The Future Life. 1 99 

ployments we shall have ; we only know that life 
means growth and development, and that eter- 
nity means freedom from the limitations of time 
and sense. " Where will you be then ? " said 
some one once to Luther. " Under Heaven," 
he answered, and the words implied all that 
we mean when we talk about the impossibility 
of ever getting away from the divine presence, 
the divine love. 

" Our joys are shaded. The perfect smile be- 
longs to God alone." ! Yet if, in other spheres, 
enlargement of spiritual life shall mean, as it 
must mean, the ever more and more perfect re- 
flection in us of the perfect " smile " of God, all 
our vague dreams of Heaven shall be more than 
realized. 

Hell is no longer to the enlightened Christian 
mind the gehenna of the Hebrews or the sul- 
phureous lake of the Calvinistic creeds ; it is 
something far more terrible, — the corruption 
and narrowness and emptiness and loss of vital 
power of the retrograding soul. 

Heaven is not pearls and flowers, and fruits 
and banquets, but something infinitely better 
and more to be desired, — enlargement of soul, 

1 Victor Hugo. 



200 Heart of the Creeds. 

light, and liberty, and love ; " That perfect pres- 
ence of God's face which we for want of words 
call Heaven." 

How shall we escape hell and gain Heaven ? 
By following conscience and true self-love, 
which, as Bishop Butler says, " always lead 
the same way." 

" Be docile to thine unseen Guide ; 
Love Him as He loves thee : 
Time and obedience are enough, 
And thou a saint shalt be." * 

1 Faber. 



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